ime for a man to be engaged in writing a book, is
a very long time for a man to be in a passion.

The imputation of being in a passion Mr Sadler will not disclaim. His
is a theme, he tells us, on which "it were impious to be calm;" and he
boasts that, "instead of conforming to the candour of the present age,
he has imitated the honesty of preceding ones, in expressing himself
with the utmost plainness and freedom throughout." If Mr Sadler really
wishes that the controversy about his new principle of population should
be carried on with all the license of the seventeenth century, we can
have no personal objections. We are quite as little afraid of a contest
in which quarter shall be neither given nor taken as he can be. But we
would advise him seriously to consider, before he publishes the promised
continuation of his work, whether he be not one of that class of writers
who stand peculiarly in need of the candour which he insults, and who
would have most to fear from that unsparing severity which he practises
and recommends.

There is only one excuse for the extreme acrimony with which this book
is written; and that excuse is but a bad one. Mr Sadler imagines that
the theory of Mr Malthus is inconsistent with Christianity, and even
with the purer forms of Deism. Now, even had this been the case, a
greater degree of mildness and self-command than Mr Sadler has shown
would have been becoming in a writer who had undertaken to defend the
religion of charity. But, in fact, the imputation which has been thrown
on Mr Malthus and his followers is so absurd as scarcely to deserve
an answer. As it appears, however, in almost every page of Mr Sadler's
book, we will say a few words respecting it.

Mr Sadler describes Mr Malthus's principle in the following words:--

"It pronounces that there exists an evil in the principle of population;
an evil, not accidental, but inherent; not of occasional occurrence,
but in perpetual operation; not light, transient, or mitigated, but
productive of miseries, compared with which all those inflicted by human
institutions, that is to say, by the weakness and wickedness of man,
however instigated, are 'light;' an evil, finally, for which there is
no remedy save one, which had been long overlooked, and which is now
enunciated in terms which evince anything rather than confidence. It is
a principle, moreover, pre-eminently bold, as well as 'clear.' With a
presumption, to call it by no fitter name,