CONSERVATIVE STANDARD OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE: ERECTED IN A TIME OF TROUBLE FOR ALL THOSE WHO FEAR GOD AND HONOUR THE KING. BY THE REV. GEORGE BURGES, VICAR OF HALVERGATE AND OF MOULTON, IN NORFOLK. SECOND EDITION. LONDON: WHITTAKER AND CO., AVE-MARIA LANE; RIVINGTONS, ST. PAUL'S. MDCCCXXXV. PREFACE. WHEN I published my "Conservative Address to the Freeholders of the British Empire," in January last, I pledged myself, "at a future and not very distant period," to employ my pen upon a subject connected therewith. This pledge I have here redeemed. I further expressed a hope, that I might be able to make some amends for the imperfection of the remarks then hastily thrown before the Public. How far this hope has been realized others must determine. We are now, in all human appearance, on the eve of Revolution; of that Revolution which, in the year 1819, I endeavoured to impress, as strongly as I was able, upon the honest and intelligent mind, the not very distant probability of. A little time must now witness, either the preservation or the destruction of our Establishment, in Church and State. Before that time arrives, it behoves all to do what they can for the good of their country; for that which, in their estimation, constitutes its good. This solemn duty I, for one, have here endeavoured to perform; and with such adversaries as I have had to cope with, such severity as I have been compelled to use, and such prospects as, on every side, surround and threaten, I have perhaps need enough to exclaim, "God send me a good deliverance." I humbly hope he will-but, at all events, I hold it no dereliction of virtue to expose the corrupters of public virtue to contempt. I am quite aware, that the task I have imposed upon myself I have very imperfectly accomplished; that against these "Whigs of England"-now become the ruin and the shame of England-I have not employed half the severity I ought; that I have too leniently stigmatized the deplorableness of their folly, and the greatness of their iniquity; and that I have only produced a faint likeness of the men, whose crimes against their country invite the strongest, the darkest, the most enduring representation. Against Whigs of the Old School, all censure would have been uncalled for, and all recrimination vain; but these Whigs, creating and outdoing the very Radicals themselves in mischief, hang over us as a disgusting terror. Isaac Tomkins is not a more loathsome defiler of “the Aristocracy of England" than they. The coarseness even of that coarse mind must yield to them in injury to the order. It will be found that I have given, in some measure, a Religious cast to this Political Tract. The subject will be seen clearly to have required it. That subject is, His Majesty's Declaration in Defence of the Established Church of England and Ireland. Let one fall, and both will fall! I have not much care upon me about the Whig insinuations, that the Clergy ought not to go out of their line, |