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the innocent and to punish the guilty ? It isiprabxfWy maay . years since his lordship read Horace j but he can scarcely h ^ ve fo rgotten that beautiful character of the
upright man which ^ is in the mouth of every school-boy and which so pointedly contradicts hjs false and injurious statement .
Justum et tenacem propositi vlrum Non civ him ardor prava juh ^ ntium , £ J © n * vultus instantis tyrarinl Mente quatit solida . - The upright man steadily adheres to his principle ; nor suffers his virtuous resoluU » n to he shaken , either by the clamour < % f a corrupt people , or the Jroiun of a tyrant *
The bishop cannot be ignorant , that Justice and Fortitude are placed among the cardinal virtues , and honoured and celebrated with
the most enthusiastic praises by the poets and moralists of antiquity ; and can he possibly believe , that tjiese noble qualities were held in such high esteem and universal
admiration , and yet , that there were no instances of their existence in real life ? Has he in fact , never beard of tfee name of Socrates of
of Aristidcs ^ Pittacus , of Phocion , of Epaminondas , among the Greeks ; or of Junius Brutus , of Caro , of Scipio Africanus , of Marcus Aiirelius , among the
Romans ? That justice was sometimes perverted by Heathen magistrates is beyona dispute , but can bis lordship be serious when he woqld have us believe that this is never the case in what are called
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Christian countries ? What ! has he never heard of bribery and corruption , of unjust judges , civil and ecclesiastical , of time-serving bishops ,, of servile parliaments ^ of profligate ministers of state , of debauched , cruel * and tyrannical jpanarchs among jprofessing Chris-
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tians ? To look no farther than our own country ; have the names ofJefFeries as a judge , of Bonner as a bishop , and of Henry the eighth- us a sovereign , never reached his ears ? Or does he really believe that these worthies would
have been less chaste and temperate , less just and iiprighr , less mild and merciful than they actually were , if they had been so unfortunate as to have had only the light of nature to direct them ? Was not ^ the las t mentioned great
persofiage- i-n whose horrible reign no fewer than seventy-two thousanci persons perished by the hand &f the executioner , so good a Christian as to have acquired the tittle of Defender of the Faith for himself and 4 iis successors ? Were
not those judges , among whom was a lord chancellor and a chief justice , who were his accomplices in the execrable murder of the virtuous Sir Thomas More , all Christians ? And those who , to
obtain court favour , countenanced Charles the first in his illegal exactions , as well as those who , to please the mob , condemned him to death , were they not all Christians , as much as those who sit in the court of kinu ' s bench at this
day ? Was not Jefferies himself a Cfciristjan , of whom the accurate Rapin declares that , " Never man had better deserved a public punishment , as an atonement , for all the mischiefs ( lone to his
country ^ and for all the blood spilt hit his means ? " Surely the bishop cannot have forgotten , that since the reformation from popery , at which period , it is pretended that Ch ristianity was established in England , in its purest apd most perfect form , there have been two instances , of the highest law officer
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468 Mr . Stutck on a passage iff $ ke Bishop ofj ^ pn tfo n * Sermons .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1808, page 466, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2396/page/10/
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