ON THE DEATH OF THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE

OF WALES:

A

SERMON

DELIVERED IN

THE TRON CHURCH, GLASGOW,

ON

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 19TH, 1817,

THE

DAY OF THE FUNERAL OF HER ROYAL HIGHNESS

THE

PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF WALES

PREFATORY NOTICE.

I REPUBLISH this Sermon chiefly for the sake of the Advertisement prefixed, and the Appendix subjoined to it. In regard to the former, I take this opportunity of recording, after the experience of twenty-one years, that the perpetual misinterpretation laid on the conduct of clergymen by politicians, forms one of the most prolific sources of that injustice to which our profession is exposed. The Appendix I am particularly anxious to preserve— as an evidence, that in 1817, not only was the argument for a National Church propounded, which has since become familiar to statesmen as well as to ecclesiastics, but that then it was when that suggestion for the extension of our Establishment was made, which, now that it is being acted on, is branded by its opponents as a monstrous and unheard of novelty.

T. C.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THE following Sermon is the fruit of a very hurried and unlooked for exertion and never was there any publication brought forward under circumstances of greater reluctancy, and with a more honest feeling of .unpreparedness on the part of the author. The truth is, that he was at a great distance from home, when the urgency of the public demand for his personal appearance on the nineteenth of November reached him; and that so late, that he had no other resource than to write for the pulpit during the intervals, and after the exhaustion of a very rapid and fatiguing journey. It is true that he might revise. But to revise such a composition, would be to re-make it; and he has chosen rather to bring it forward, and that as nearly as possible in the literal terms of its delivery.

But it may be asked, if so unfit for the public eye, why make it public? It may be thought by many, that the avowal is not a wise one. But wisdom ought never to be held in reverence separately from truth; and it would be disguising the real motive, were it concealed, that a very perverse misconception which has gone abroad respecting one passage of the Sermon, and which has found its way into many of the Newspapers, is the real and impelling cause of the step that has been taken; and that, had it not been for the spread of such a misconception, there never would have been obtruded on

the public, a performance written on a call of urgent necessity, and most assuredly without the slightest anticipation of authorship.

But, it may be said, does not such a measure as this bring the pulpit into a state of the most degrading subordination to the diurnal press-since there is not a single sermon which cannot be so reported, as, without the literality of direct falsehood, to convey through the whole country all the injuries of a substantial misrepresentation? And if a minister should condescend publicly to notice every such random and ephemeral statement, he might thereby incessantly involve himself in the most helpless and harassing of all controversy.

Now, in opposition to this, let it be observed, that a person placed in this difficult and disagreeable predicament, may advert for once to such a provocation, and that for the express purpose, that he may never have to do it again. He may count it enough to make one decisive exposure of the injustice which can be done in this way to a public instructor, and then hold himself acquitted of every similar attempt in all time coming. He thereby raises a sort of abiding or monumental antidote, which may serve to neutralize the mischief of any future attack, or future insinuation. By this one act, though he may not silence the obloquies of the daily press, he has at least purchased for himself the privilege of standing unmoved by all the mistakes, or by all the malignities which may proceed from it.

Yet, it is no more than justice to a numerous and very important class of writers, to state it as our conviction of the great majority of them, that they feel the dignity and responsibility of their office; and hold it to be the highest point of professional honour, ever to

maintain the most gentlemanly avoidance of all that is calculated to wound the feelings of an unoffending individual.

There is one temptation, however, to which the Editors of this department of literature are peculiarly liable, which may be briefly adverted to; and the influence of which may be observed to extend even to a higher class of journalists. There is an eagerness to transmute every thing into metal of their own peculiar currency —there is an extreme avidity to lay hold of every utterance; and to send it abroad, tinged with the colouring of their own party-there is a ravenous desire of appropriation extending itself to every possible occurrence, and to every one individual whom they would like to enlist under the banners of their own partisanship; which, for their own credit, they would be more careful to repress, did they perceive with sufficient force, and sufficient distinctness, that it makes them look more like the desperadoes of a sinking cause, than the liberal and honest expounders of the politics and the literature, which when rightly treated claim so respectable a portion of the intelligence of the country.

The writer of this Sermon has only to add, that he does not know how a sorer imputation could have been devised against the heart and the principles of a clergyman, than that, on the tender and hallowed day of a nation's repose from all the sordidness and all the irritations of party, he should have made the pulpit a vehicle of invective against any administration; or that, after mingling his tears with those of his people, over the untimely death of one so dear to us, he should have found room for any thing else than those lessons of general Christianity, by which an unsparing reproof is ministered to impiety, in whatever quarter it may