rthodoxy against all impugners, and shut himself up
in texts of Scripture and huge volumes of the Commentators as an
impregnable fortress;--he merely makes use of the stronghold of religion
as a resting-place, from which he sallies forth, armed with modern
topics and with penal fire, like Achilles of old rushing from the
Grecian tents, against the adversaries of God and man. Peter Aretine is
said to have laid the Princes of Europe under contribution by penning
satires against them: so Mr. Irving keeps the public in awe by insulting
all their favourite idols. He does not spare their politicians, their
rulers, their moralists, their poets, their players, their critics,
their reviewers, their magazine-writers; he levels their resorts of
business, their places of amusement, at a blow--their cities, churches,
palaces, ranks and professions, refinements, and elegances--and leaves
nothing standing but himself, a mighty landmark in a degenerate age,
overlooking the wide havoc he has made! He makes war upon all arts and
sciences, upon the faculties and nature of man, on his vices and his
virtues, on all existing institutions, and all possible improvements,
that nothing may be left but the Kirk of Scotland, and that he may be
the head of it. He literally sends a challenge to all London in the
name of the KING of HEAVEN, to evacuate its streets, to disperse its
population, to lay aside its employments, to burn its wealth, to
renounce its vanities and pomp; and for what?--that he may enter in
as the _King of Glory_; or after enforcing his threat with the
battering-ram of logic, the grape-shot of rhetoric, and the crossfire of
his double vision, reduce the British metropolis to a Scottish heath,
with a few miserable hovels upon it, where they may worship God
according to _the root of the matter_, and an old man with a blue
bonnet, a fair-haired girl, and a little child would form the flower of
his flock! Such is the pretension and the boast of this new Peter the
Hermit, who would get rid of all we have done in the way of improvement
on a state of barbarous ignorance, or still more barbarous prejudice, in
order to begin again on a _tabula rasa_ of Calvinism, and have a world
of his own making. It is not very surprising that when nearly the
whole mass and texture of civil society is indicted as a nuisance, and
threatened to be pulled down as a rotten building ready to fall on the
heads of the inhabitants, that all classes of people run