If you like it, use it: if not, you know the remedy. It is serious, yet epigrammatic—like a bishop at a ball!"
W. C.
It is remarkable, that the laudable efforts which are now making to enforce the better observance of the Lord's day, to diminish the temptations to perjury by the unnecessary multiplication of oaths, and to arrest the progress of the vice of drunkenness, appear from the following letter to have been anticipated nearly fifty years since, by the Rev. William Unwin. Deeply impressed with a sense of the extent and enormity of these national sins, his conscientious mind (always seeking opportunities for doing good) led him to urge the employment of Cowper's pen in the correction of these evils. What he suggested, as we believe, was as follows, viz. to draw up a memorial or representation on this subject to the bench of bishops, as the constituted guardians of public morals, and thus to call forth their united exertions; secondly, to awaken the public mind to the magnitude of these crimes, and, finally, to obtain some legislative enactment for their prevention.
We now insert Cowper's reply to the proposition of his friend Mr. Unwin.
TO THE REV. WILLIAM UNWIN.
My dear Friend,—I am sensibly mortified at finding myself obliged to disappoint you; but, though I have had many thoughts upon the subjects you propose to my consideration, I have had none that have been favourable to the undertaking. I applaud your purpose, for the sake of the principle from which it springs, but I look upon the evils you mean to animadvert upon as too obstinate and inveterate ever to be expelled by the means you mention. The very persons to whom you would address your remonstrance are themselves sufficiently aware of their enormity; years ago, to my knowledge, they were frequently the topics of conversations at polite tables; they have been frequently mentioned in both houses of parliament; and, I suppose, there is hardly a member of either who would not immediately assent to the necessity of a reformation, were it proposed to him in a reasonable way. But there it stops; and there it will for ever stop, till the majority are animated with a zeal in which they are at present deplorably defective. A religious man is unfeignedly shocked when he reflects upon the prevalence of such crimes; a moral man must needs be so in a degree, and will affect to be much more so than he is. But how many do you suppose there are among our worthy representatives that come under either of these descriptions? If all were such, yet to new model the police of the country, which must be done in order to make even unavoidable perjury less frequent, were a task they would hardly undertake, on account of the great difficulty that would attend it. Government is too much interested in the consumption of malt liquor to reduce the number of venders. Such plausible pleas may be offered in defence of travelling on Sundays, especially by the trading part of the world, as the whole bench of bishops would find it difficult to overrule. And with respect to the violation of oaths, till a certain name is more generally respected than it is at present, however such persons as yourself may be grieved at it, the legislature are never likely to lay it to heart. I do not mean, nor would by any means attempt, to discourage you in so laudable enterprise, but such is the light in which it appears to me, that I do not feel the least spark of courage qualifying or prompting me to embark in it myself. An exhortation therefore written by me, by hopeless, desponding me, would be flat, insipid, and uninteresting; and disgrace the cause instead of serving it. If, after what I have said, however, you still retain the same sentiments, Macte esto virtute tuâ, there is nobody better qualified than yourself, and may your success prove that I despaired of it without a reason.
Adieu,
My dear friend,
W. C.
Cowper, it seems, declined his friend's proposal, and was by no means sanguine in his hopes of a remedy. The reasons he assigns are sufficient to deter the generality of mankind. Still there are men always raised up by the the providence of God, in his own appointed time—endowed from above with qualifications necessary for great enterprises—distinguished too by a perseverance that no toil can weary, and which no opposition can divert from its purpose, because they are inwardly supported by the integrity of their motives, and by a deep conviction of the importance of their object. To men of this ethereal stamp, trials are but an incentive to exertion, because they never fail to see through those besetting difficulties, which obstruct the progress of all good undertakings, the final accomplishment of all their labours.