the superintendence and tuition of an ecclesiastical establishment for
both instruction and jurisdiction, co-extended with the entire nation, and
furnished for its ministry with men from the discipline of institutions
where everything the most important to be known was professed to be
taught. Thus endowed had England been, thus was she endowed at the period
under our review, (the former part of the last century,) with the
facilities, the provisions, the great intellectual apparatus, to be
wielded in any mode her wisdom might devise, and with whatever strength of
hand she chose to apply, for promoting her several millions of rational,
accountable, immortal beings, somewhat beyond a state of mere physical
existence. When therefore, notwithstanding all this, an awful proportion
of them were under the continual process of destruction for want of
knowledge, what a tremendous responsibility was borne by whatever part of
the community it was that stood, either by office and express vocation, or
by the general obligation inseparable from ability, in the relation of
guardianship to the rest.

But here the voice of that sort of patriotism which is in vogue as well in
England as in China, may perhaps interpose to protest against malicious
and exaggerated invective. As if it were a question of what might
beforehand be reasonably expected, instead of an account of what actually
exists, it may be alleged that surely it is a representation too much
against antecedent probability to be true, that a civilized, Christian,
magnanimous, and wealthy state like that of England, can have been so
careless and wicked as to tolerate, during the lapse of centuries, a
hideously gross and degraded condition of the people.

But besides that the fact is plainly so, it were vain to presume, in
confidence on any supposed consistency of character, that it _must_ be
otherwise. There is no saying _what_ a civilized and Christian nation, (so