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Committee , to write to the London Committee , in order to expose the state of things , and to show that the under price at which the Bibles from London are distributed in France , will inevitably ruin our French Society . It would bd much wiser that the London Committee should entrust our French Society with its distribution of Protestant Bibles ; but this the Committee appears little
inclined to do , and the principal reason is , that we are still tainted with the poison of the Apocrypha ; And then , the English Saints like better to have their own saints in Paris , with whom they communicate , without performing the circuit of an official and enlightened committee of members . Our saints opposed with great violence that a letter of complaint should be sent to London , and the question is not decided yet . One thing is very certain ;
if the London Committee persist in inundating France by private agents , with Protestant bibles of Martin and Oste * vald , at prices infinitely below ours , it is evident that our Society can no longer exist . But this is nothing to your saints , provided they go on their own way . —I forgot to state , in beginning this letter , that the member of the chief counsel of our University , entrusted With our Protestant academical affairs , is M . Cousin , late the eloquent
Platonist , but who , since the revolution of July , is become an outrageous juste milieu , has abandoned his fine situation of professor of philosophy , and seems to do nothing else but receive the pay of two or three sinecure places . I do not like to see Cousin appointed chief of our faculties and colleges . He is mystic in his ideas , and pretends that the same Trinity that exists in Plato is essential to the Christian religion . His ignorance of the real
principles of our Reformation , and of its consequences for France , is immense ; proud and conceited , like every disciple of Dominus Royer Collard , his real views are that truth is a privileged distinction only fit for philosophers like himself , while the mass of the community must for ever linger in the fetters of superstition , —that is to say , at least of symbolical ideas , where truth is veiled with images and symbols adequate to the notions of the
populace . All this is nothing else than a most ridiculous scientific aristocracy . But I hope that France is fast approaching to a period , where we shall have dukes and marquises neither in science nor anywhere else . I am afraid that Cousin will do . some harm to our Protestant academies of Strasbourg and Montauban , which are both centres of rationalism , including however , ideas of a divine revelation . These institutions , where
the Unitarian doctrine , openly professed at Strasbourg by Professor Richard , and at Montauban by Professors Montet and Nazon , are viewed by our saints with actual rage ; and every plan of persecuting these prdfessors , lawfully or unlawfully , will be resorted to by these holy men . It is in this respect , that Cousin ' s ideas , about naked dogmatical truth not being fit for the people at large , may become fatal . Our St . Simonitea had
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French Protestantism . 569
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No . 68 . * »
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1832, page 569, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1818/page/65/
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