To this idea, the Reformed Church of England with its marriable and married Clergy would have approximated, if the revenues of the Church, as they existed at the death of Henry VII., had been rightly transferred by his successor;--transferred, I mean, from reservoirs, which had by degeneracy on the one hand, and progressive improvement on the other, fallen into ruin, and in which those revenues had stagnated into contagion or uselessness,--transferred from what had become public evils to their original and inherent purpose of public benefits, instead of being sacrilegiously alienated by a transfer to private proprietors.

That this was impracticable, is historically true; but no less true is it philosophically, that this impracticability, arising wholly from moral causes, (namely, the loose manners and corrupt principles of a great majority in all classes during the dynasty of the Tudors,) does not prevent this wholesale sacrilege, from deserving the character of the "first and deadliest wound inflicted on the Constitution of the kingdom; which term, in the body politic, as in bodies natural, expresses not only what is and has been evolved, but likewise whatever is potentially contained in the seminal principle of the particular body, and which would in its due time have appeared but for emasculation in its infancy.

This, however, is the first sense of the words, Church of England.

[4] The second is the Church of England as now by law established, and by practice of the law actually existing.

That in the first sense it is the object of my admiration and the earthly 'ne plus ultra' of my religious aspirations, it were superfluous to say: but I may be allowed to express my conviction, that on our recurring to the same ends and objects, (the restoration of a national and circulating property in counterpoise of individual possession, disposable and heritable) though in other forms and by other means perhaps, the decline or progress of this country depends.