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The ready and condescending manner in which Your ROYAL HIGHNESS hath been graciously pleased to accede to the petition expressive of my wish, affords to the Church of England at a crisis when "those who hate her wrongfully are many in number and mighty" the high consolation, that she finds in You what she hath ever found in YOUR ILLUSTRIOUS FATHER, not merely a nominal but a real DEFENDER of her Faith-while the personal honour conferred upon myself, and the expressions of regard with which Your ROYAL HIGHNESS has been pleased to speak of the memory of

the late Bishop of St Asaph must ever be remembered with a sense of the deepest gratitude, and with feelings of unfeigned loyalty and zealous attachment to Your ROYAL PERSON, by

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THE

EDITOR'S

PREFACE.

In the interval between the time of Dr Priestley's emigration to America and the death of Bishop Horsley, the exertions of the Unitarians appear to have lost much of their wonted activity. "The patriarch of the sect (strange result of victory) had fled; and the oracles and orators of Birmingham and Essex-Street were dumb; or if they

spoke, spoke only to be disregarded.'

No

sooner however had happened the melancholy event which deprived the church of England of one of her most able champions, and at the same time released the Unitarians from the fears which they had justly entertained of their indefatigable opponent, than the party again ventured forth from their hiding places. places. The columns of the daily papers were once more filled with their speeches at public meetings, and the press again groaned under their pamphlets. At a meeting of the friends to the Unitarian fund held at the London Tavern immediately after the rejection of Lord Sidmouth's bill in 1811, one orator insisted upon the necessity of diffusing the advantages of the

* See the Bishop of Rochester's Charge to the Clergy of his Diocese in the year 1800.

Unitarian system among the poor; another suggested the propriety of instituting an academy for students between 18 and 25 years of age; and a third, to raise the spirits of the party to the highest pitch of hope, did not scruple to declare that so far from Socinianism not becoming the religion of the people, he expected to live to see the day, when by means of missions among them, and through the endeavours of the Socinians' friend Mr JOSEPH LANCASTER, Roman Catholics would become good Uni*tarians.* Glorious æra, when all errors in faith shall be for ever done away and abolished by the joint exertions of Socinian Missionaries, and Mr JOSEPH LANCASTER!

His amor unus erat, pariterque in bella ruebant.

* See the Morning Chronicle for the 6th of June 1811.

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