at one time to maintain a thesis in the University, proposed to the Bishop, for his approbation, the following:—"That the eternity of Hell torments is contradictory to the goodness of God." The Bishop observed, that he thought this a bold doctrine to maintain in the face of the Church; but Paley persisted in his determination. Soon after, however, having sounded the opinions of certain persons, high in authority, and well read in the orthodoxy of preferment, he came back in great alarm, said he found the thing would not do, and begged, instead of his first thesis, to have the reverse one substituted in its stead, viz.—"That the Eternity of Hell torments is not contradictory to the goodness of God."—What burning daylight is here thrown on clerical discipline, and the bias of a University education! This passage is worth all Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History, Wood's Athenæ Oxoniensis, and Mr. Coleridge's two Lay Sermons. This same shuffling Divine is the same Dr. Paley, who afterwards employed the whole of his life, and his moderate second-hand abilities, in tampering with religion, morality, and politics,—in trimming between his convenience and his conscience,—in crawling between heaven and earth, and trying to cajole both. His celebrated and popular work on Moral Philosophy, is celebrated and popular for no other reason, than that it is a somewhat ingenious and amusing apology for existing abuses of every description, by which any thing is to be got. It is a very elaborate and consolatory elucidation of the text, that men should not quarrel with their bread and butter. It is not an attempt to show what is right, but to palliate and find out plausible excuses for what is wrong. It is a work without the least value, except as a convenient common-place book or vade mecum, for tyro politicians and young divines, to smooth their progress in the Church or the State. This work is a text-book in the University: its morality is the acknowledged morality of the House of Commons. The Lords are above it. They do not affect that sort of casuistry, by which the country gentlemen contrive to oblige the Ministers, and to reconcile themselves to their constituents.
