religion will be rational and manly.  I doubt whether religion would reap all the benefits which the calculating divine computes from this “great company of great preachers.”  It would certainly be a valuable addition of nondescripts to the ample collection of known classes, genera, and species, which at present beautify the hortus siccus of Dissent.  A sermon from a noble duke, or a noble marquis, or a noble earl, or baron bold, would certainly increase and diversify the amusements of this town, which begins to grow satiated with the uniform round of its vapid dissipations.  I should only stipulate that these new Mess-Johns in robes and coronets should keep some sort of bounds in the democratic and levelling principles which are expected from their titled pulpits.  The new evangelists will, I dare say, disappoint the hopes that are conceived of them.  They will not become, literally as well as figuratively, polemic divines,—­nor be disposed so to drill their congregations, that they may, as in former blessed times, preach their doctrines to regiments of dragoons and corps of infantry and artillery.  Such arrangements, however favorable to the cause of compulsory freedom, civil and religious, may not be equally conducive to the national tranquillity.  These few restrictions I hope are no great stretches of intolerance, no very violent exertions of despotism.

But I may say of our preacher, “Utinam nugis tota illa dedisset et tempora saevitiae.”  All things in this his fulminating bull are not of so innoxious a tendency.  His doctrines affect our Constitution in its vital parts.  He tells the Revolution Society, in this political sermon, that his Majesty “is almost the only lawful king in the world, because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people.”  As to the kings of the world, all of whom (except one) this arch-pontiff of the rights of men, with all the plenitude and with more than the boldness of the Papal deposing power in its meridian fervor of the twelfth century, puts into one sweeping clause of ban and anathema, and proclaims usurpers by circles of longitude and latitude over the whole globe, it behooves them to consider how they admit into their territories these apostolic missionaries, who are to tell their subjects they are not lawful kings.  That is their concern.  It is ours, as a domestic interest of some moment, seriously to consider the solidity of the only principle upon which these gentlemen acknowledge a king of Great Britain to be entitled to their allegiance.

This doctrine, as applied to the prince now on the British throne, either is nonsense, and therefore neither true nor false, or it affirms a most unfounded, dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional position.  According to this spiritual doctor of politics, if his Majesty does not owe his crown to the choice of his people, he is no lawful king.  Now nothing can be more untrue than that the crown of this