Right Revd. Brother and so forth The Bishops send you greeting, They honour much the zeal and worth In you so highly meeting. But your abuse of us, good Sir Is very little founded! We blush that you should make a stir With notions so ill grounded. 'Tis not to us should be addrest Your ghostly exhortation, If heresy still lifts her crest The fault is in the nation. The State, in spite of all our pains, Has left us in the lurch, The spirit of the times restrains The spirit of the Church. To this day down from famed Sacheverel Our zeal has never cooled, We mean to Truth and Freedom ever ill, But we are over ruled. Still damning Creeds framed long ago, Help us to vent our spite; And penal laws our teeth to shew Although we cannot bite. Our spleen against reforming cries Is now as ever shewn; Though we can't blind the nation's eyes We still can shut our own. Well warned from what abroad befalls, We keep all tight at home; Nor brush one cobweb from St. Paul's, Lest it should shake the dome. Once in an age a Louth may chance To wield the pastoral staff, And Fortune for a whim advance A Hoadly or Landaff. Yet do not thou by fears misled To rash conclusions jump, So little leaven scarce appears, And leaveneth not the lump. What though the arm of flesh be dead And lost the power it gives, The spirit quickeneth, it is said, And sure the spirit lives. Would it but please the civil weal To lift again the Crosier, We soon would make those yokes of steel Which now are bands of osier. The Birmingham Apostle then, And Essex Street Apostate, Debarred from paper and from pen Should both lament their lost state. Church maxims do not greatly vary, Take it upon my honour, Place on the throne another Mary, We'll find her soon a Bonner. |