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Untitled Article
approach this high and honourable distinction , each individual looking upon his fellow-men as weak and fallible creatures , rejoices as cordially to see them delivered from civil or ecclesiastical tyranny as a htmrtane person who witnesses the deliverance of the inoffensive sufferer from his goading fetters , or long imprisonment for the Transgression of a Jaw of which he Was
ignorant . Some of these religious fetters ^ after corroding the flesh of those who have worn them for some centuries past , or as one may say , ce wearing out the saints of the Most High /* have ^
lately been mercifully loosed in France , not by the Levite who has continued to pass by on the othiTr side of him who fell among thieves , but by the good Samaritan the organ of better laws and a more enlightened policy . I am now alluding , Sir , to the poor Waldenses , or the
Vaudois ; these obscure and almost forgotten sufferers , from whom a great Potentate could scarcely have any , thing to hope , have at length been delivered ! Let future generations read and be
astonished ! After a struggle with a series of the most cruel persecutions , continued with little intermission through several centuries ; after their powerful appeals to the best of all the preceding monarehs , and the fruitless mediation of several Protestant estates in their behalf , it seemed reserved for the
new government only to remove the sword which , like that of t ) amocles ^ was suspended by a single thread over the heads of these unoffending people ; for in one day all their anxieties for the past and apprehensions for the future were removed . The Prefect of the department of the Po , oh the 6 th of October last , 1 &O 5 , bearing the imperial authority , arrived at La Tour to instal the pastors of the tbtee consistorial churches granted to the
Vaudois of the valleys of Pigncrol , by the imperial decree of "Thermidor 6 . The annunciation of the Prefect ^ he being oh his wayfdr this pprpose , we were informed from Turin , * redoubled thft
joy occasioned by the knowledge of the decree which placed their worship under the protection of goveriixnent , put a period to the state of uncertainty , and finally covered with etefnal obljivion those innumerable calamities inflicted in the ages of superstition and fanaticism . " Upon a review of the £ arly
history of the Vaudois , to which these reflections allude , one cannot help exclaiming , gracious God ! what a multitude of sins have been covered by this single act of charity !
Wh y this act of such importance to the community , and so gratifying to every lover of mankind , was not communicated t& a British public through the usual channel of the riewapapers is probably owing to a fallacious prejudice upon which I am not
Untitled Article
6 & Religious Toleration in France ,
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1806, page 68, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1721/page/12/
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