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affect the Roman Catholics of these countries , saying aad believing all sorts of smooth things of the religion of these Roman Catholics , I confess I feel surprised and pained ; because to me they appear very evidently to take the most unsound and precipitate views of the state of the case .
When I am told by many concurrent authorities , that Queen Mary , at a period when the Pope and Papal Courts were peculiarly virulent , did exercise many judicial severities upon her Protestant subjects , as such , I am only required to believe what , upon previous grounds , it is highly credible she would think it her duty to do .
On the contrary , when I am told by rival authorities , that Queen Elizabeth and her advisers , who had abjured , not totally , indeed , but to a considerable extent , the despotic theory of the Romish church , committed similar atrocities upon Catholics , in their character of dissidents merely , I am called upon to believe a thing not so credible in its own nature , and which , therefore , I require to be supported by evidence much more forcible than had sufficed to obtain my assent to the former proposition . Intolerance is the crime of ecclesiastics , but in the hands of one
denomination , professing to leave every man to his own conclusions , it is suicidal . Whereas , in those of another , which assumes the privilege of deciding for the rest of mankind , and boasts of its " holy incompatibility" with any permission of dissent , intolerance is as natural , and its sanguinary enforcements , when historically reported , as credible as any other effect from an adequate
cause . I renounce , then , and I think I must speak the feeling of every considerate lover of freedom , when I renounce in their name , that very questionable superiority to prejudice which , because they may sometimes approximate in practice , however remote in their theory , would lead us to confound the merits of all religious systems . Nor can I be a party to that species of
candour which , from the fear of embarrassing the political prospects of modern Catholics with the vicious nature of their system , would induce us to hail with alacrity every attempt which is made to disarm that aversion to their religion , which ought to be as deep as its own foundations , and which we know , in despite of all such special pleading , and all such g lossing of records , to repose upon the most abject and irreclaimable prostration of the human mind .
Dr . Lingard may succeed , in a degree , in the particular controversy in which the Edinburgh Review has involved him : but why such compliments , and why such cheering , as if Catholicism , by a few touches of his pen , were really become that amiable thing which its infatuated admirers would have it to be ? Above all things , why , on the part of Unitarians—themselves the most free of all religious sects—the most opposed ( because the least believing ) to all spiritual authority of man over his fellow-man—this tampering , I had almost said this adulation , towards the character of Catholicism which we sometimes meet with in their publications ? May I , with the most
unaffected respect , be permitted to ask , why so studiously , not alone in your comments on Dr . Lmgard ' s Vindication , but in your review of the " Narrative of the Sufferings of a French Protestant Family , " more expressly still , appear to regard it as the mere dotage of the bigot , that Catholicism is , inherently , an intolerant , usurping , and , with your permission , I will say it , a something more than repressive system ? That " all the crimes of those who profess it" are chargeable to the religion of Catholics , God forbid I should assert ; but , Sir , can you seriousl y maintain , that the revocation of the edict of Nantz ( the subject upon which
Untitled Article
Tendency of the Catholic Religion , 343
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1827, page 343, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1796/page/31/
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