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1825

NEW

18445.

HEM AOBK

C. Stower, Printer, Paternoster Row.

ΤΟ

LORD VISCOUNT SIDMOUTH.

MY DEAR LORD,

Next to His Majesty, whom I would not venture, without his express permission, to approach, you are, as it seems to me, most incontestibly the person to whom discourses like the following may, with the greatest propriety, be addressed.

It has happened to you, what I believe never happened to any other minister, that as well your first entering into office, as latterly your retiring from it, have been marked by the most disinterested attachment to the religion of your country as well as to the interests of your sovereign, to the church as well as to the state.

Of the many benefits which resulted to the nation at large from your administration

the

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while it lasted, and which continue to be felt even now through every member of the government, in the finances as well as in army and the navy, this is not the place to speak. Happily they now begin to be on all sides acknowledged; and if I am anxious that more complete justice should be done to you in this as in other respects, it is owing not so much to the interest which I take in all that concerns your welfare, as to the firm belief which I entertain that such a sense of your merits, if more universally prevalent, would materially tend in its consequences to improve our public situation, and to make us respectable both at home and abroad.

But I also know, that among the measures which were in your contemplation, and which you had particularly at heart, there were some which had for their immediate object the providing for the advancement and security of our ecclesiastical establishment, and the counteracting, if not preventing of those disorders, which I have laboured, in the language, and, I trust, in the spirit of Scripture, to mark and to reprove.

To these and many other reasons which might be alleged for prefixing your name to this work, I have to add the personal, and to me most gratifying consideration of that intimacy which has subsisted between us from our early youth, and which your advancement to some of the highest offices in the kingdom, has only contributed to cement and to increase.

That it may please the Almighty to crown you with every blessing, more especially by making you his instrument of good both to the king and the people, and that you may daily more and more cherish and maintain that true faith in Christ, and that entire dependence on the Divine Providence, without which there is and can be no solid peace or happiness, is the sincere wish and. prayer of him who is ever,

MY DEAR LORD,

MOST FAITHFULLY, AND

AFFECTIONATELY YOURS,

THO. LE MESURIER.

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