DISSENT AND DEMOCRACY.

The progress of politics it is easy to see, will very soon involve the Dissenters of Great Britain in its discussions, to a degree to which nothing in their recent history can furnish a parallel, and the probabilities are that in the events which are fast coming upon us, they will play a part and exercise an influence perhaps equal to those they performed and possessed when their conquering tenets made England a Republic. Scattered through every portion and grade of society, actively propagating their religion and political opinions, and as a body in their general character recommending both, by the benevolence and uprightness of their lives, they are at this moment the most numerous and important of all the classes of society which make up the Movement in political affairs— the Reformers of the United Kingdoms. Made up of every variety of religious opinion, and living perpetually in an element of discussion for the ordinary business of life is among them a species of polemical warfare, so prevalent among them is the tendency to inquiry and debate, however it may be counteracted by the narrowness of sectarianism, — their existence is hostile to the reign of authority, whether in religion, politics, or science and the principle to which they appeal, of which, though they are not the only theoretic believers, they are almost the only practical workers — the right of private judgment in religion— not to mention the influence of their forms of government, which in bodies established on the convictions of the people are necessarily popular,— is a principle pregnant with tendencies to equality, a thoroughly generative principle of democracy, they cannot hope to see the prevalence of their creed, except in a state of society free from the retarding influence of an aristocratic church; and thus, apart from the pecuniary injuries they sustain from the ecclesiastical establishment, the vital and fundamental doctrines which gather and bind them together lead them to combine with the great body of the friends of progress and amelioration, even though aware that among these, as among the Tories, there are some persons who do not share their faith, and that there are many who have no sympathy with their merely sectarian peculiarities. Yet, of this remarkable and important class of political reformers, a large body of the politicians to whom this Journal is addressed, have remained in comparative ignorance. Many of the radicals are members of the established churches both in England and Scotland, and are thus shut out from opportunities of knowing, and prevented from accurately inquiring into, the state and peculiarities of the powerful friends who, on stirring occasions, in hours of political enterprise and conflict, are now beginning to rush out and join their ranks with characteristic boldness and energy. The Dissenters are composed of many sects, differing from each other in numerous variegated shades of Christian belief, although they, to the follower of the Established Church, present but one one common idea of dissent, and in his notions of them there is seldom more distinctness than in the notions he would have of the simple colours of which light is the compound, if he had never seen it decomposed by a prism. Still their common tendencies are democratic. Each sect may merely aim at selling up the authority of its creed, but the consequence of their efforts, the result of their agitations, is hostile to all illegitimate authority, friendly to individual scrutiny of evidence, and thus favourable to truth and man. Fanaticism, which is the raving of the weak when very much in earnest, whether about religion or politics and charlatanterie, which is the making of dupes by self-advertisement, will always exist in societies vigorously and seriously active ; as cant and hypocrisy are inseparable from societies in which great worldly advantages are attached to the maintenance of a creed; but these are the mere refuse from the crucible of the refiner, the dross which is necessarily produced by the process towards perfection by which the gold brightens, until it reflects truly and beautifully the forms and colours presented before it. He who belongs to no sect acts most unwisely if he remains ignorant of what sects are and of what sects are doing, and if he permits his hatred of sectarianism, by allowing it to degenerate into an ill-informed bigotry, to turn him aside from studying the convictions and the actions of those thousands of little communities of earnest believers and constant labourers, who in their enlarged operations, are forming societies similar to themselves in every region of the earth, —
" 'Mong Greenland's icy mountains
On India's coral strand ;"
and in their political spheres at home, sprinkled as they are on every hill and valley in the land, are daily weakening and withering up the strength of the supporters of feudal and aristocratic institutions, and every hour bringing ardent and unflinching recruits into the tents of democracy. The Dissenters claim to be one half of the inhabitants of the three kingdoms: the men who have a strong interest that no sect should have a provision made for it by the law of the state declare that they have grown equal in numbers to the persons who belong to an institution of deriving pecuniary support from the public coffers ; this is a fact which, whether the claim is already correct or merely becoming so, carries death on its front to the system of political religion which gives brand and dignity to so many of the aristocracy. The Dissenters grapple here with the Peers. The struggle is come. His dreams must be wild indeed who expects to stop or retard the democracy of England ! The influence of life in towns,— their commerce, which is everywhere creating a kind of wealth hostile and superior to wealth of heirship and land, — their intercourse, which by the activity of intellect it causes, promotes enquiry into what is best, — their affairs, which form men with the habits of interest in public business, their facilities for the interchange of news, which fosters the fondness for the applause of the many, and consequently favours their opinions and interests, — and their very closeness of vicinity and population by which they are towns, making co-operation easy and necessary;—all these are sources of democratic feelings and opinions; elements sufficient to originate the spirit of democracy if it did not exist already, and which, when they have given it birth and nurture for ages, form around it an asylum and a bulwark. Dissent co-operates with these influences. * * *
The Dissenter will not stop disseminating the Voluntary Principle, because the Whigs may abandon the Appropriation Clause. The habits of self-government, more or less engrafted on the people by all sects of Dissenters, especially Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers, will not cease to make them political Reformers,— men who see equality in the meaning of the precept which bids them do as they would be done by,— men who see the separation of Church and State in the spiritual nature of the Christian dispensation,— men who find a violation of the sixth commandment in the demand for Church Rates,— men who perceive opposition to the institutions of Primitive Christianity in legislative and lordly bishops. The rules and discipline of these societies,— the distinction they give to personal qualities, power to superior talent, and veneration to moral worth,— will not fail to produce men hating corruption in every department of the state, and destructive of privilege, whoever may enjoy its sweets and wherever it may take up its abode, even when the Lower House of Parliament shall join the Higher, and the Tories shall have a majority. The meeting houses of dissent are schools of democracy. While the interests of the Peerage are in favour of the pecuniary support of a sect by the state, and the interests of all other sects against it,— while the Dissenters teach all classes of men to think, act, speak, govern, and agitate for themselves, and reverence and obedience to individual convictions are precepts, the inculcation of which is essential to their progress, the aristocracy will find among them many thousand camps filled with enemies of unceasing hostility, and in them the friends of the people will find the bravest under their banners. Guizot, in his work on Civilization, has divided its progress into two kinds—individual and social; and, though this country contains a critic in a leading journal witless enough to remark on his division that, because society is made up of individuals, the advancement of the community and of the individual must be the same thing,— people who can discern things that differ will generally perceive a distinction between an improvement in the local government of a town and a change in the religious or political convictions of its inhabitants. They will see, indeed, the one to be a creature of the other ; the local institutions, the results in most cases of the opinions of the townsmen, and yet re-acting in some degree, on the opinions of which they are the offspring. A change in the opinions of a man is a fruitful thing. A revolution in the thoughts of a community is a precursor of a change in their social institutions; and of the two changes the most powerful and wonderful is the revolution of thought. On this the Dissenters act. The philosopher, a mighty agent in this department of the great operations of civilization, addresses chiefly the higher order of cultivated minds in his age: his light touches directly only the mountain tops; the power of his works acts on the many by transmission; or to return to our former metaphor, the valleys receive only the reflected lustre of the truths he tells. But the Dissenter addresses the masses. His torch lights the footsteps of the people. He carries along with him into poor men's cottages the doctrine of the atonement of Jesus Christ— a doctrine the most wonderful and powerful of all the doctrines in the creeds of the human race,—

. . . . . .

Dark, indeed, must the heart and history of man be to that mind in which this doctrine has not been studied and appreciated; and, whatever may be the difficulties investing it, the modifications of it existing in different sects, and the scepticism with which it may be regarded by some cultivated intellects, without a profound study of it no man can understand either the philosophy of the nature or the philosophy of the history of man. It is the most powerful thing in the world; it has been the most wonderful thing in history. The time, we hope, is come, when philosophers, instead of investing it with puzzles, shall devote their powers of analysis to appreciate and explain it. This is the chief message the Dissenters carry to the whole earth; and, though they will themselves think it a profanation to say it—and their enemies may turn the statement into a false accusation— in one of its aspects, the doctrine is political and democratic. It is a message of equality— a message which fastens the affections to institutions hostile to exclusive privileges,— which makes men martyrs for constitutions of churches and principles of ecclesiastical government in which the blazonry of feudalism has no place, the chicanery of statesmanship no control, the sceptre of royalty no power. By teaching men that the Church of Christ is a voluntary institution, in which Parliaments cannot make laws— in which Peers cannot hold patronage— in which neither crowns nor coronets are known— where personal qualities alone are important, the Dissenters bring all the power of sacredness and tenderness in the doctrine of the Cross to bear against the baubles add titles of the Peerage — against the Church whose mitred heads vote in senates, — and against the state-paid institution which affords to the aristocracy so splendid a revenue of dignity, influence, and wealth. They may not be party politicians; but their most holy and devoted men produce political results. They are made democrats by their piety.

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The Dissenters, we have said, are the teachers of the poor. It requires a man only to enter the congregations of the established churches in England or Scotland, in city or village, and compare the aspect of the audiences he sees with those in the neighbouring dissenting meeting houses to perceive that the latter alone are the assemblies of the working classes. In the Establishments the instruction of the poor is the pretext for gorgeous churches for the rich. The Church of England is the church of the aristocracy; and even in the Church of Scotland so long an instructor of the poor, whose ministers were wont to be the sons of poor men, intimately acquainted wild all the habits and feelings of "the sons of toil," the young race of clergymen are the offspring of the landed proprietors in the country and the rich merchants of the towns while the number of humbly-born preachers who can creep into her pulpits through the servilities of tutorships, in the families of the aristocracy, is diminishing every day. The churches paid out of the property of rich and poor alike are the churches of the rich ; the rationale of charity being that it is a compulsory tax on the needy for the behoof of the wealthy. The dissenters have made democracy a portion of the sacred convictions of the poor. If they had merely implanted a desire in each sect for equality with every other, they would have done much for democracy; but by their principles, which identify the essentials of their faith and discipline with the progress of civilization in our political institutions, and by their position, which makes the working classes the persons through whom they diffuse their wholesome and ennobling convictions, they act directly on the portion of the community to whose interests democracy belongs, and thus impart the strength and enthusiasm of sacredness to the impulses of interest. They nerve the hearts of hard-fisted men. The thing which of late they have only done for missionary and religious objects, but which in former times they did also for political ends, they will do again when political times demand it, call forth to their aid the energy and genius scattered among the working classes. They give motives and convictions to the genius and talent dormant among the people. They have given distinguished names to our literature, which but for them, would have remained like grains of gold among the sand, their noble and valuable qualities lost to the uses of the world. There has not been an age in our literary history which Dissenters have not brought into the ranks of the learned and brilliant, men who but for their patronage in helping their first efforts, and discrimination in selecting them from the masses of poverty, would never, there is every reason to believe, have emerged from the wide wastes of humble life. Enumeration would be endless. The Dissenters educated Akenside. They gave Bishop Butler to the church. The grave of William Godwin, so recently covered, might never have been a distinguished one had they not furnished him with his early education. One of the striking facts in our literary history, is the process by which the doctrines and instructions of the Dissenters gave to England a great creative genius:— John Bunyan was a tinker, and the son of a tinker; he was a man whose debauched life had only been varied between the irregularities of his itinerant trade and those of the life of a common soldier,— a man of genius, in whom mental superiority appeared only in wild wit, which sported with blasphemy, and in the vivid imaginings which cowered his spirit occasionally before superstition, only that it might spring up again into all the recklessness of blackguardism. But the more than magical doctrines taught by Dissenters have touched the heart of the tinker. He is now a man of principle, and for twelve years and a half he is prisoner for the sake of freedom of conscience, making tape and lace, and creating an allegory the most remarkable in the world. The tinker becomes a martyr of freedom; his sharpened intellect and quickened fancy transmute the observations of his wayward life into illustrations of his convictions; and spending the remainder of his days the most popular of itinerant teachers, travelling staff in hand, the venerable hair of the decent Puritan streaming over his shoulders as he walks on the high road, passed contemptuously by the Bishop of Peterborough in his carriage — whose coachman admired Bunyan,— the man of genius is restored to his destiny; the blasphemer becomes a messenger of piety; and to his own day and to distant times the depths of blackguardism yield up a missionary of civilization to millions.
What the Baptists did for Bunyan, the Dissenters are still doing. . . . . . —Westminster Review.

Launceston Advertiser 12 April 1838,