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another in the performance of his religious duties , as an encouragement to insincerity , an unwarrantable pretence to infallibility , a cruel injustice to individuals , a source of weakness and division in the state , and , finally , a grievous insult and injury to religion itself ; and more especially they deem the connexion of a solemn religious ordinance with the qualification for secular office a profanation , against which , as Christians , they are bound , on all occasions , to
protest . Your petitioners , therefore , humbly and earnestly pray your honourable House to take these laws into your early consideration , and to remove the grievances which result from them ;—to relieve this country from the reproach , which belongs to her alone , of
profaning the holy ordinances of Christianity for secular ends;—and to declare and act , in all things , upon those great principles of Religious Liberty which have been recognized in so many other countries , and which , as your petitioners believe , are essential to the peace , and virtue , and happiness of mankind . And your petitioners shall ever pray , &c .
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382 Intelligence ..- * - ChangeofMinistry , ~
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mity with the Church of England , so far as to receive the sacrament of the Lord ' s Supper according to its usages . That , in the exercise of the same right of private judgment , and with the same spirit of reformation , on which the founders of the Church of England rested their separation from that of Rome , your petitioners openly declare
their Dissent from the Doctrines , Discipline , and Ritual of the Church now established by law , and cannot , therefore , offer that conformity which is required of them , and in default of which they are by law excluded from the common rights and honours of citizenship in a free country .
That , in order to avert the evils which would result from the general enforcement of such laws , Indemnity Acts have been , from year to year , passed ; but your petitioners see , in such expedients , only a confirmation of the obnoxious principle of exclusion . Those Acts treat as matter of offence what your petitioners consider as the inalienable right and
undoubted duty of an accountable being . They are , moreover , in their legal operation , imperfect;—they do not profess to shelter the conscientious;—they are founded on the assumption , —in itself unauthorized and untrue , —of mere inadvertent omission , and of consequent intention to conform within the period allowed;—they leave in the hands of every individual the power of defeating
the election of any Dissenter to offices which he may be called upon and is well qualified to fill;—and finally , they , year by year , admit and confirm the principle , alike oppressive and impolitic , by which one branch of the community is shut out from the general blessings of good government , and subjected to degradation which no conduct on their part has merited .
That it is , in the judgment of your petitioners , incumbent on those who geek the continuance of laws of exclusion and disability , to prove , at every moment , their necessity , and the demerits of those who are the subjects of them ; and your petitioners , therefore , do not feel themselves called upon to tender any vindication of their conduct in society , still less of their religious principles , for which they hold themselves responsible to no earthly judge .
Claiming , as their right and duty , to exercise , in common with all their fellow-men , their free and unfettered judgment in matters of religion , your petitioners deem the assumption of authority , whether to punish or to tolerate
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Change of Ministry . It is not a little singular that the apparent triumph of bigotry and intolerance , recorded in our last number , should be so soon followed by the total discomfiture of the whole party which directed it , and an avowal of the incompetence of their principles to be the foundation of any government in this country . The extent to which the result of this reaction will be favourable
to more liberal views is necessarily , while we write , uncertain ; but one thing at least is plain , that the change must be productive of great good . In France , at the same moment , public opinion has achieved a noble triumph ; of the more importance to her , because it is the first in which principle and justice have fairly fought and won a battle through regular and constitutional
means . The law enslaving the Press has , after a long and obstinate attempt to carry it through the Chambers , been precipitately withdrawn by those who sent it ; and it is difficult to conceive either that such aa attempt can be renewed , or that the triumph of the pr inciple of resistance to oppression can end there . It will be a happy day for France when She is satisfied that her constitutional checks upon power sympathize
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1827, page 382, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1796/page/70/
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