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Untitled Article
say ? and should study the good old fable of the old man , his son , and the ass . They have tried in vain to stand well with ja . tory clergy and a tory peerage , and they may try as vainly to stand well with those who cant and those who rant . They can only build up a permanent and useful , authority on the basis of public
approval and enlightened principle . They should make no compromise with factions , aristocratical , political , commercial , or theological . They should aim at ruling for the nation and by the nation . They will then grasp the true rod of Aaron , which will bud and blossom for ages after it has swallowed up all these little vipers .
It is astonishing that so much ignorance and superstition should yet survive in the notions which , to a certain extent , pass current amongst us , concerning the operations of Providence , and the efficacy of ceremony . It is clear , that whatever be the law or means of its progress , the cholera has hitherto advanced in a direction which can be indicated , and , we may almost add , at a rate which can be calculated . It neither visits a sinning country
by miracle , nor avoids or leaves a praying country by miracle . It obeys the fixed laws of physical existence . We know that those laws are only the uniform operations of Providence : hence every suffering is providential infliction , as every blessing is providential bounty . For this very reason , it is not piety but superstition which associates Providence peculiarly with the spread of this disease . It is either superstition or cant which takes such an
opportunity of introducing Providence into the preamble of an act of parliament—cant , perhaps , in the legislature , by way of compliment to superstition out of the legislature ; for we can Bcarceiy ascribe superstition to the present Bishop of London , and still less to the late editor of the Edinburgh Review . The Lord Advocate is not perhaps to be held personally responsible ; for it seems that he had been specially informed that the cholera
was the work of Providence , by the concurrent testimony of all the letters written to him from Scotland on that subject . The Bishop of London pleaded precedent , —it having been enacted that the fire of London and the illness of George the Third were by Divine Providence . This was an unhappy pair of precedents for his pious preamble , as the great fire turned out a great blessing to the metropolis , and the king ' s illness , if a judicial calamity at all , could only be so upon himself .
There is something worse than inconsistency in such phraseology . It not only misrepresents the mode of operation , and virtually denies the universality of Divine Providence * but it also misrepresents the moral qualities , and virtually denies the uni * « y $ fsaV benignity of the divine character . There is not only ths jnischief pf selecting from the mingled mass of what is painful and what is pleasurable , that which is pre-eminently painful , in order to cotmect- it peculiarly wHh the notion of Providence , but
Untitled Article
\ 5 O The Fast Day and 4 he Cholera .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1832, page 150, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1808/page/6/
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