From the beginning of the reign of Anne, all was a contest of leading statesmen at the head of parties. Those contests exhibit great mental power, singular system, and extraordinary knowledge of the art of making vast bodies of men minister to the personal objects of avarice and ambition. But they do no honour to the moral dignity of England. All revolutions are hazardous to principle. A succession of revolutions have always extinguished even the pretence to principle. The French Revolution is not the only one which made a race of _girouettes_. The political life of England, from the death of Anne to the reign of George the Third, was a perpetual turning of the weathercock. Whig and Tory were the names of distinction. But their subordinates were of as many varieties of feature as the cargo of a slave-ship; the hue might be the same, but the jargon was that of Babel. It was perhaps fortunate for the imperial power of England, that while she was thus humiliating the national morality, which is the life-blood of nations; her reckless and perpetual enemy beyond the Channel had lost all means of being her antagonist. The French sceptre had fallen into the hands of a prince, who had come to the throne a debauchee; and to whom the throne seemed only a scene for the larger display of his vices. The profligacy of Louis-Quatorze had been palliated by his passion for splendour, among a dissolute people who loved splendour much, and hated profligacy little. But the vices of Louis the Fifteenth were marked by a grossness which degraded them in the eye even of popular indulgence, and prepared the nation for the overthrow of the monarchy. In this period, religion, the great purifier of national council, maintained but a struggling existence. The Puritanism of the preceding century had crushed the Church of England; and the restoration of the monarchy had given the people a saturnalia. Religion had been confounded with hypocrisy, until the people had equally confounded freedom with infidelity. The heads of the church, chosen by freethinking administrations, were chosen more for the suppleness than for the strength of their principles; and while the people were thus taught to regard churchmen as tools, and the ministers to use them as dependents, the cause of truth sank between both. The Scriptures are the life of religion. It can no more subsist in health without them, than the human frame can subsist without food; it may have the dreams of the enthusiast, or the frenzy of the monk; but, for all the substantial and safe purposes of the human heart, its life is gone for ever. It has been justly remarked, that the theological works of that day, including the sermons, might, in general, have been written if Christianity had never existed. The sermons were chiefly essays, of the dreariest kind on the most commonplace topics of morals. The habit of reading these discourses from the pulpit, a habit so fatal to all impression, speedily rendered