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Untitled Article
insists as strenuously as we can do on there being no priesthood in Christianity , we have only to ask him why he countenances an establishment which assumes the principle of a priesthood ; and why , discerning so clearly as he does the proneness of the multitude to vicarious religion , he upholds a system which affords the utmost conceivable encouragement to this vice . If it must needs be that the offence cometh , who would assist the means by which it comes ?
If Dr . Whately sees that true Christianity has no priesthood , and believes that the primitive church government ( of which his own is but an indecent caricature ) was an institution of expediency , meant to be modified by time and circumstance , he must discern the approach of the day when every man shall serve at the altar , ( since that altar is the heart of every man ;) when every man shall be brought up to a divine profession , ( since gospel
wisdom is a pursuit of individual attainment ;) when the only ranks in the Christian hierarchy will lie in different degrees of spiritual accomplishment ? Why retard this happy time ? Why take all possible pains to propagate and confirm by the practice , while the lips and the pen contradict , the impression that there is an order of servants of the altar , that there is a peculiar divine profession , that there is a divinely authorized gradation of ranks in the Christian community ? Not all that the archbishop can do in explaining the character and offices of Christian ministers ; not all his advocacy of the education of the poor for the sake of promoting personal religion ; not all his careful explanations of the professional distinction between clergy and laity ; not all his clearly defined appreciation of what it is in which Christian pastors are to be an example to their flocks , will nullify or greatly mitigate the
pernicious influence of his sanction of a system which upholds every one of the abuses he labours to expose . Does he remember that there have been Romanists as candid , as sagacious , as exemplary as himself , who have with equal earnestness separated the pure truth of their system from its entanglements , only to have the web woven round again as closely as ever when they were called away from their work ? Fenelon possessed the spirit of the
gospel in much strength and purity , and through it became a benefactor to society : but he was a Romanist archbishop ; and through his office became a pattern of superstition , and in so far , the enemy of the race for whom he would have laid down his life . Whately but we leave our readers to make out the parallel for themselves , once more offering our conclusion in the author's
words . ' Now if the Jews be justly condemned who crucified our Lord between two thieves—thus studiously ** numbering with the transgressors '' of the vilest kind the only man who never transgressed—it is awful to think what account those will have to render at the last day who labour to vilify his religion by confounding it with the grossest systems of . human imposture and
Untitled Article
Romanism and Episcopacy . 385
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1832, page 385, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1814/page/25/
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