Whoever has an over zealous wife,
Becomes the priest’s Amphitrio during life.’
Marvel’s State Poems.
(CONCLUDED)
February 7, 1818.
This then is the secret of the alliance between Church and State—make a man a tool and a hypocrite in one respect and he will make himself a slave and a pander in every other, that you can make it worth his while. Those who make a regular traffic of their belief in religion, will not be backward to compromise their sentiments in what relates to the concerns between man and man. He who is in the habit of affronting his Maker with solemn mockeries of faith, as the means of a creditable livelihood, will not bear the testimony of a good conscience before men, if he finds it a losing concern. The principle of integrity is gone; the patriotism of the religious sycophant is rotten at the core. Hence we find that the Established Clergy of all religions have been the most devoted tools of power. Priestcraft and Despotism have gone hand in hand—have stood and fallen together. It is this that makes them so fond and loving; so pious and so loyal; so ready to play the Court-game into one another’s hands, and so firmly knit and leagued together against the rights and liberties of mankind. Thus Mr. Southey sings in laureat strains:—
‘One fate attends the altar and the throne.’
Yet the same peremptory versifier qualifies the Church of Rome with the epithets of ‘that Harlot old,—
‘The same that is, that was, and is to be,’—
without giving us to understand whether in Popish countries, the best and most ‘single-hearted’ portion of Europe, the same lofty and abstracted doctrine holds good. This uncivil laureat has indeed gone so far in one of his ‘songs of delight and rustical roundelays,’ as to give the Princess Charlotte the following critical advice:—