From your omitting to speak upon the war, and your general disapprobation of French measures and French principles, expressed particularly at this moment, we are necessarily led also to conclude that you have no wish to dispel an infatuation which is now giving up to the sword so large a portion of the poor, and consigning the rest to the more slow and more painful consumption of want.  I could excuse your silence on this point, as it would ill become an English bishop at the close of the eighteenth century to make the pulpit the vehicle of exhortations which would have disgraced the incendiary of the Crusades, the hermit Peter.  But you have deprived yourself of the plea of decorum by giving no opinion on the REFORM OF THE LEGISLATURE.  As undoubtedly you have some secret reason for the reservation of your sentiments on this latter head, I cannot but apply the same reason to the former.  Upon what principle is your conduct to be explained?  In some parts of England it is quaintly said, when a drunken man is seen reeling towards his home, that he has business on both sides of the road.  Observing your Lordship’s tortuous path, the spectators will be far from insinuating that you have partaken of Mr. Burke’s intoxicating bowl; they will content themselves, shaking their heads as you stagger along, with remarking that you have business on both sides of the road.

The friends of Liberty congratulate themselves upon the odium under which they are at present labouring, as the causes which have produced it have obliged so many of her false adherents to disclaim with officious earnestness any desire to promote her interests; nor are they disheartened by the diminution which their body is supposed already to have sustained.  Conscious that an enemy lurking in our ranks is ten times more formidable than when drawn out against us, that the unblushing aristocracy of a Maury or a Cazales is far less dangerous than the insidious mask of patriotism assumed by a La Fayette or a Mirabeau, we thank you for your desertion.  Political convulsions have been said particularly to call forth concealed abilities, but it has been seldom observed how vast is their consumption of them.  Reflecting upon the fate of the greatest portion of the members of the constituent and legislative assemblies, we must necessarily be struck with a prodigious annihilation of human talents.  Aware that this necessity is attached to a struggle for Liberty, we are the less sorry that we can expect no advantage from the mental endowments of your Lordship.

APPENDIX to Bishop Watson’s Sermon.

[It is deemed expedient to reprint here the Appendix to Bishop Watson’s Sermon, which is animadverted on in the preceding Apology.  G.]

The Sermon which is now, for the first time, published, was written many years ago; it may, perhaps, on that account be more worthy of the attention of those for whose benefit it is designed.  If it shall have any effect in calming the perturbation which has been lately excited, and which still subsists in the minds of the lower classes of the community, I shall not be ashamed of having given to the world a composition in every other light uninteresting.  I will take this opportunity of adding, with the same intention, a few reflections on the present circumstances of our own and of a neighbouring country.