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Untitled Article
will acknowledge to produce the legislation of wisdom , and the government of affection . Meantime there is much to be done ; there are many lessons to be learned ; and amongst them is the expediency of dropping quietly whatever the past has left us which is unfit for present use , and ceasing to order national fasts when the nation has ceased to have faith in fasts .
The Hioral feebleness of the government is apparent not only in the inefficiency of the command , but in the influence by which its promulgation has been forced upon them . We do not mean that any other administration would have had more moral strength , or so much ; the weakness to which we refer arises from the present state of society , and the want of a sufficient and appropriate accommodation in our institutions to the progress which
society has made . Such weakness is inherent in all attempts to rule the present by those forms of the past which increased intelligence has rendered obsolete . Who believes that men of such minds as Lords Brougham , Grey , and Althorp , really expect to check the progress of the cholera by a public fast ? Who imagines that the physicians have faith in their own prescription ? We say nothing of opinions which those individuals or other
members of the government may have at any time avowed ; we say nothing of the rationality or irrationality of the notion of the efficacy of fasting ; we look simply at the modern political history of Sunday . We look at those cabinet dinners , and privy council meetings , which Monday ' s newspaper records , week after week , in almost unbroken succession . Be they right or wrong in those
meetings and dinings , these are not the men to attempt the creation for the country of a fifty-third Sabbath in the year eighteen hundred and thirty-two . They are clearly not acting on their own views and feelings . After Lord Althorp ' s denial , we will not say that no fast would have been proclaimed but for Mr . Perceval's motion , but we do believe that it would never have been
contemplated save in deference to the theological faction of which he is the organ . We do believe it to have originated in a desire to deprecate their hostility , or to conciliate their support , or at least to purchase their neutrality . The nation neither wanted , wished , nor will observe it , ( as a proper fast , that is , ) but a party of enthusiasts were craving for it , and they have carried their point . So it continually happens in this country . We are not one people , but a collection of little bands , united amongst themselves by a
peculiar interest or opinion , and each waging a sort of predatory warfare against the whole . The ultra-Evangelical Church cohort will now inscribe National Fast upon its banners , as those of a regiment of the line bear the inscription of ' Alexandria' or ' Talavera . V They think they have done something for the Deity . They have gained a victory for his glory over the liberalism and infidelity of the age . Truly that must be a feeble government -which they have mastered , or which stoops to placate their vio >
Untitled Article
146 The Fast Day and the Cholera .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1832, page 148, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1808/page/4/
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