d of every thing, and will cease to
be a church at all. She cannot continue to be a depository of any faith,
or a champion of any doctrines, if she lose the means of defending her own
incorporations. But how can she maintain the defenders of her rights or
the dispensers of her truths, if she refuses, upon immutable principle, to
call in the aid of the magistrate on behalf of rights, which, under any
aspect, regard spiritual relations? Attempting to maintain these rights by
private arbitration within a forum of her own, she will soon find such
arbitration not binding at all upon the party who conceives himself
aggrieved. The issue will be as in Mr O'Connell's courts, where the
parties played at going to law; from the moment when they ceased to play,
and no longer "made believe" to be disputing, the award of the judge
became as entire a mockery, as any stage mimicry of such a transaction.

This should be the natural catastrophe of the case, and the probable
evasion of that destructive consummation, to which she is carried by her
principles, will be--that, as soon as her feelings of rancour shall have
cooled down these principles will silently drop out of use; and the very
reason will be suffered to perish for which she ever became a dissenting
body. With this however, we, that stand outside, are noways concerned. But
an evil, in which we _are_ concerned, is the headlong tendency of the Free
church, and of all churches adulterating with her principle, to an issue
not merely dangerous in a political sense, but ruinous n an anti-social
sense. The artifice of the Free church lies in pleading a spiritual
relation of any case whatever, whether of doing or suffering, whether
positive or negative as a reason for taking it out of all civil control.
Now we may illustrate the peril of this artifice, by a reality at this
time impending over society in Ireland. Dr Higgins, titular bishop of
Ardagh, has undertaken, upon this very plea of a spiritual power not
amenable to civil control, a sort of warfare with Government, upon the
question of their power to suspend or defeat the O'Connell agitation. For,
says he, if Government should succeed in thus intercepting the direct
power of haranguing mobs in open assemblies, then will I harangue them,
and cause then to be harangued, in the same spirit, upon the same topics,
from the altar or the pulpit. An immediate extension of this principle
would be--that every disaffected clergyman in the thre