THE MONUMENT TO LUTHER.
YE Tories, subscribe! subscribe ye Conservatives ! ye fiercely Protestant, relax your purse-strings I For behold, a monument is to be erected to him whose cry was ever " No Popery !" True, it was the cry of Freedom then, and now of Corruption, Kingcraft, and you : but subscribe, for now ye are pledged to worship the man whom living ye would have persecuted unto death.
Falsehood has this peculiar misfortune—sneaking through her crooked paths, she never can know upon what monster of contra- diction or absurdity she may not at any moment alight. A simple turning, to the right or left, may bring her in a minute risoi-vis with some preposterous-faced goblin of mischief whom she never dreamt to deal with. She is hemmed round, in fact, with esil spirits of all kinds, who, while they pretend her service, contrive her disgrace; and it is her especial mistske to deem herself the dectiver, while she is uniformly the deceived. Now, amongst the road-side experiences (so to speak) of Falsehood, there is none more common than for her to find herself suddenly pitched plump into the middle of a grievous moral mud bank of her own carting, graveolent with old lies and prevarications, from which there is plainly no escaping but with a drenched soul and the eternal scorn of all clean consciences.
Look now at the Tories in their relation to LUTHER and his Reformation. Into what a ridiculous position are they not forced ! Look well and closely into the matter, for you will not comprehend at one glance the length and breadth of the absurdity. Consider, LUTHER was the very personification of Radical Reform : lie was a Destructive, he was a Repealer, lie sought to destroy the faith of Europe, to subvert a church, to annihilate an ancient time- honoured institution — not peculiar to a single nation — an institution common to all the civilized world — venerated by universal Christendom. He sought to root it up, and to sub- stitute another. The sturdy Radical was all his life destroying. agitating, repealing. Now, without fuss or flourish, we plainly put it to the reader's common sense—had the Tories lived in that day, would they have been Lutherans ? Would they have been Protestants ? We venture to say there is not a single man in Britain, capable of understanding the question, who will not answer it in the negative. No; they would have been all stanch Roman Catholics, burners of heretics, loyal to their Pope, con- servatives of transubstantiation and sacred relics, and the true and inflexible pocketers of all they could get. Who can doubt
? Are not the Tories for whatever is old and tainted with cor- ruption? The mites in a cheese are Tories: the cheese is their church : men call the cheese " rotten —if the mites speak, be assured they would call it " venerable."
For the Whigs, into whatever false positions they are forced by the hard necessities of their profession, we can feel no pity what- ever. But the Tories appear to us rather as objects of commisera- tion. The Whigs—the commercial Whigs—have all their lives kept a shop in the retail liberal line; and we can only laugh when we see their struggling gentility still bound to the old counter and condemned to go on measuring out its pennyworths of reform. But the Tories are decayed gentlemen, and have seen better times; and we entertain a distinct compassion for them. We have always pitied them for being Protestants; they ought to have been Papists. Nor is England, in any other respect, a happy or appropriate residence for them. How can the Tories be friendly to the house of Hanover, or to 'S the principles that placed them on the Throne ?" No; but let a king only get on the throne, no matter how, and be once firmly seated there, we answer for it Tories will grow up thereabouts, as naturally as rats in a corn-rick. As the royal seat warms the Tories are hatched—it is a law of nature. It is obviously all the same to them, then, what principles are in vogue, so that they be productive of warmth. They are like those dirty individuals who won't change foul linen because they are warm in it. It requires some courage to meet clean sheets in winter weather—tile Tories are for never changing them at all : they love them the better the longer they lie in them ; they become affectionately attached to them; each individual stain ac- quires its charm and its associations; they would not part with them for the world. The chamber-maid calls them "odious"— they call them "venerable.' The early Protestant Church was a cold clean sheet, with which Tories would assuredly have had nothing to do. But now that Church is a fine warm berth for them, and they discover unnumbered virtues in it. It, too, has become " venerable ' in its turn, and is not to be touched for the world. "No Washerwoman!" should be the cry now—not "No Popery," —for they would gladly have Popery again, if they could only have it with all its perquisites and corruptions undisturbed. They are, however, content with the Church they have got, and its pretty pickings, and its State connexions, Ind all the countless branches and tributary streams, great and small, connected with the golden Pactolus that flows through its heart. They find this so venerable that they are resolved to abide by it. Sup- pose now another change in the national religion were to take place, and the Methodists or the Unitarians were to gain the upper hand in the country,—Dissenters ftom the Established Church, as were the Protestants three hundred years ago, then let us tell you what would become of the Tories. They would not die, (they never die!) but, gradually warming under the skirts of Methodism, they would become stanch Methodists—would lay
down sewers for the old corruptions to circulate in under new names—would just give the corners of their mouths a slight decli- nation, and be as happy as ever. "No Bishops!" "No Episcopal
Church ! "—these would be their cries. With all the loaves and fishes in the hands of the "Establishment,- (that is to say, the Methodist Chapel,) what would they care for the religion of their
forefathers? Not a button—no more than they do now for the Pope. Methodism would, in less than a hundred years, become in all respects as " venerable " and as snug in its appointments
as was Popery formerly and Protestantism now. It would be just the same if it were Jumpism, Swedenborghism, or any other ism. Oh, we should like to drop from the skies and hear them crying, "The Chapel in danger!" or, " The Meeting-house in danger !" As to LUTHER, it is obvious that he must have opposed Tories—and Whigs too—toth and nail, had lie lived in these days ; ay, and that very Protestant Church which he founded. His thun- ders would have been levelled as surely against the corruptions of the one Church as of the other. 'He would have been in his turn hated, persecuted, killed if possible, by the greater part of the pious men who are now subscribing to his monument. We take the first Tories to have been those who persecuted our Saviour ; Jew Tories, (a very proper sort of Tories,) who found that a change was threatened, and a reform with cold clean sheets intolerable, and determined to resist it altogether.
But Turies new are Christians of the first water—of course. Once they were Roman Catholics, and put a price on LUTHER'S head; now they are Protestants, and subscribe to his monument!
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