GUY FAWKES'S STATE VISIT TO CHURCH.
THE Gunpowder Plot ritual was duly read last Sunday in all the churches of the Establishment. To do the clergymen justice, how- ever, many of them seemed heartily ashamed of it. Not a few of them took occasion in their sermons to advert to the peculiar ser- vice of the day, and their language was in general apologetic and palliatory. They felt that it was necessary to say something in explanation.
It was not, however, very easy to explain why we should con-
tinue to be so emphatically grateful that King Jamas and sundry noblemen and gentlemen had escaped a great danger, some two hundred years after all the parties are dead and forgotten. In general, it is deemed sufficient if we evince due gratitude for our own personal mercies ; we are not called upon to express a lively sense of those allotted to our great-great-grandfathers. We neither wear mourning on the anniversaries of the deaths of those remote ancestors, nor celebrate with festivals the anniversaries of their marriages. Still less do we deem it necessary to keep a red-letter book of the executions of the TIMMINS, CARTOUCHES, and other criminals of the past, and glow with indignation at their crimes and satisfaction at their punishment, duly as the day comes round. It is wisely ordered that every man shall be grateful for his own good fortune, as he must be ashamed of his own faults. We can- not help sympathizing with our neighbour's joy when we accident- ally witness it ; but it is not incumbent upon us to go out of our way and lash ourselves up into ecstacies because he has been fortu- nate.
It is not true that the escape of King JAMES, his Lords and Gentlemen, is a blessing personally felt by those of the present generation. Our constitution in Church and State would at this day have been much the same as it is even though GOY Fawass had blown them all up with himself. The people of England were in the mass thorough ingrained Protestants, and their hatred of Papacy would not have been softened by the perpetration of such an atrocity in its name. The stubborn Puritanical spirit which in England rode rough-shod over King and Cavaliers not many years later, and which in Scotland, with scarcely credible tenacity of life, survived the exterminating policy of LAUDERDALE and CLA- VERHOUSE, was already strong in the land. Even though the whole of the Roman Catholics could have been brought (and it is scarcely credible that they could) to sanction and avail themselves of such a massacre, the Protestants would have been too many for them. A fearful amount of individual misery might have been occasioned by the success of the conspirators; but the tree of the British con- stitution was already too strong and deeply-rooted to be overthrown by such puny means. The escape for which we are called upon to return thanks every Fifth of November, was not an escape of that social framework which still survives, of which we are all of us con- stituent atoms, but merely of the individuals whose lives were en- dangered.
The perpetuation of the Gunpowder Plot service is not only uncalled-for, but it is positively mischievous. It explicitly declares one falsehood, and indirectly fosters another. It proclaims the lie that by blowing-up the House of Lords, the right of private judg- ment, the faith in the Gospels, and for the matter of religion in them alone, could have been rooted out of the land ; and it tacitly sanctions the belief that all Roman Catholics approved, and con- tinue to approve, of such means of exterminating heresy.
The truth is, that the end and aim of the Gunpowder Plot ser- vice is the same as that of carrying about Guy FAWKES'S effigy. It is a Guy exhibited in church by the clergyman, in rivalry of the Guy exhibited by the schoolboys out of doors. Five years the schoolboys have the better of the clergyman; for, parading their Guy through the streets, it is more seen than his Guy, which must keep within doors. But on the sixth year the clergyman has ample amends ; for then, not only is his church crowded on the day his Guy is exhibited, but the little boys are not allowed to show theirs till the day after. The splendour of the rival Guys is in our day materially abated : the Police prevent the little boys from in- dulging in their former liberal allowance of squibs and crackers ; and the apologetic tone of Fifth of November sermons shows that some power or another has put down the oratorical squibs and crackers with which they used to be stuffed.
It is time that the church exhibitions of Guy were dispensed with altogether. There are sonic so Puritanically-minded as to disapprove of Kings, Queens, and Lord Mayors going to church in state. They allege that such parade distracts the congregation— unduly divides the worshipers' attention between the Creator and the creature. This may be to consider too curiously. Yet no one, we suspect, could fail to be shocked were Punch to be carried in solemn procession to all our churches of a Sunday once in every six years. And nothing but old custom could reconcile us to a similar exhibition of his brother effigy. "A sermon preached be- fore the Lord Mayor" may be endured, even though a little glori- fication of his Lordship be introduced ; and the Ordinary of New- gate has the warrant of use and wont for preaching at living criminals before their execution : but "a sermon preached before Guy Fawkes" is rather too much.
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