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Untitled Article
merous as to give them any formidable measure of power and influence in the community . 'That fact is alone sufficient to show that the religion of the establishment is not a national religion , and , therefore , that it ought not to be , or to remain
established . Religion is the supply of a want in human nature ; but the religion which is situated as we have described does not supply that want , or it would be more generally acceptable , more prevalent , more popular . The non-religious hate tithes ; but bow is it that so many are not religious ? They abound simply because the Church is inefficient . Their defence is that of the American ,
against whom an action was brought by his preacher , who had sermonized him for two years without payment : —• You have not done your work , and do not deserve your wages . You have not made me religious , or I should have paid you cheerfully . My resistance to your claim is a proof of its invalidity . ' The establishment which leaves any large portion of the people irreligious
ought to abdicate . It has been tried , and found wanting . There is some radical defect in its system . It does not work well . To cry out against the irreligion of the discontented is sheer folly . The argument tells the other way . It indicates neglect , feebleness , and defeat ; and cannot be urged for claims to the remuneration of diligence , efficiency , and success .
And so the fact , that any considerable portion of the religionists of a country is to be found in the ranks of dissent , and in circumstances having a natural tendency to generate hostility towards the temporal claims of the establishment , is a serious impeachment of the justice of those claims . The nation at large ought not , on any principle , to be taxed for a system which , to a great extent , fails either to convert the indifferent , or to retain the
converted . If it cannot conciliate the irreligious , it ought at least to satisfy the religious . The existence of dissent , of respectable and influential dissent , shows that the favoured Church wants something essential to its pretensions . We will not now stop to inquire what . It may be truth in its creeds , it may be piety in its worship , in its ministersit be in
it may be zeal , may comprehensiveness its spirit ; whatever it be , it is something which deprives that Church of a national character ,. Complain of dissent 1 The nation has a right to arraign the Church for the existence of dissent . Ask for support against the hostility of dissenters 1 That very hostility is evidence that the Church does not deserve support .
But although such are the fair deductions from the present state of things ; deductions which would , we think , commend themselves to the impartial judgment of a looker on , could any uninterested spectator be found ; it might be unreasonable to expect that they shoqld at once be admitted by members of the established Church , however religious , liberal , and enlightened . Nor do we ourselves wish that the question should be only mooted on these ground There is apother view of it , in which the subject comes home to the bosom of every sincere churchman ^
Untitled Article
Religion without Taxation * 119
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1832, page 119, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1806/page/47/
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