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Untitled Article
explain why &e Turks are not as good sailors as the English , by saying that it is all their own fault . I caiinot say jthat J think you have much advanced the question by terminating where you do . If you were writing to Pagans , it inight have been to the purpose to tell them that they would find in Christianity a corrective to their faults and ills ; or if we had
been superior to the ancients instead of inferior , as in numerous other respects we really are , Christianity might have been assigned as the cause . But to refer us to Christianity as the fountain of intellectual vigour ^ in explanation of our having fallen off in intellectual vigour since we embraced Christianity , will scarcely be satisfactory . In proportion as our religion gives us an advantage over our predecessors , must an inferiority to them be the
more manifest if we have fallen below them after all . If genius , as well as other blessings , be among the natural fruits of Christianity , there rrjust be some reason why Christianity has been our faith for 1500 years , without our having yet begun to reap this benefit . The important question to have resolved would have been , what is the obstacle ? The solution of this difficulty I have sought in vain from your two articles—permit me now to seek it from yourself .
I complain of what you have omitted , rather than of what you have said . I have found in your general observations much that is true , much that is wise , and eternally profitable to myself and to all men . The fact which you announce , of the intimate connexion of intellectual with moral greatness , of all soundness and
comprehensiveness of intellect with the sublime impartiality resulting from an ever-present and overruling attachment to duty and to truth , is deeply momentous ; and , though many have known it heretofore , you also speak as one who knows it , —who therefore has discovered it in himself . It is as true now as it was
of yore , that the righteousness of the righteous man guideth his steps . ' But Christianity , since it first visited the earth , has made many righteous men according to their lights , many in whom the spiritual part prevailed as far as is given to man over the animal and worldly , yet we have not proportionally abounded in men of genius .
There must , then , be some defect in our mental training , which has prevented us from turning either Christianity or our other opportunities to the account we might . Christianity , and much else , cannot have been so taught or so learnt as to make us thinking beings . Is it not that these things have only been taught and learnt , but have not been known ?—that the ( ruths which w <* have inherited still remain traditional , and no one among us , except here and there a man of genius , has made them truly his own ? The ancients , in this particular , were very differently circumstanoed . When the range of human experience was still narrow
Untitled Article
On Qeniui . 655
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1832, page 655, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1822/page/7/
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