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On Lord ' s day , the 12 th of July last , the Chapel belonging to the Protestant Dissenters of the Pjiesbitterian Denomination , at CXLDBURY , Staffordshire , was ope iv ei > again , after having been rebuilt , by Dr . Toulmin , of Birmingham . The Sermon was grounded oni Chron . xxix . 9 . Tken the
people rejoiced , for that they offered willingly , because with perfect heart they offered willingly to the JLord : and David , the King also rejoiced "with great joy . " The worthy minister of this Christian society , the Rev . Mr . Procter ,
is laid aside from his public labours , by a paralytic stroke . It is a happy and auspicious circumstance , under this afflicting event , that the Rev . Herbert Jenkins , having some months since dissolved his pastoral connexion at Stourbridge , has been prevailed
on to accept an unanimous invitation to officiate at Oidbury , limiting indeed , for the present , his services to the term of one year . ENGLISH UNITARIANS . —The following brief account of this much vilified denomination , we extract from
a work just published in 3 vols . 121110 entitled , " Letters from England : by Don Manuel Alvarez Esprieilaj translated from the Spanish . " The Spaniard might pass for an Englishma 7 i ; an Eng lishman too of no mean education or acquirements 5 somehow or other , be or his translator always contrives to give the reader a favourable
impressions of whig politics and rational religion ! The work is distinguished by anecdote , drollery and irony . The author ' s prophecy concerning the Unitarians is we would hope not oracular , but it suggests an useful hint to us . It needs scarcely to be premised that the sol-disant Spaniard writes as a good Catholic .
?« I have related in my last how the Dissenters , from the republican tendency of their principles , became again obnoxious to government during the present reign ; the ascendancy of the old high church and tory party and the
advantages which have resulted to the true religion . Their internal state has undergone a « great a change . One part of them has insensibly lapsed into Socinianism , a heresy , till of late years , almost unknown in England ;
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and into this party all the indifferentists , from other sects , who do not choose for political motives to join the Establishment , naturally fall . The establishment itself furnishes a supply by the falling off of those of its members , who , in the progress of inquiry , discover that the church , of England is
neither one tiling nor the other ; that in matters of religion all must rest upon faith , or upon reason ; and have unhappily preferred the sandy foundation of human wit . CreJe ut intelligasy noli Intelligere ut credas % is the wise precept of Saint Augustine ; but . these heretics have discarded the fathers as well
as the saints . These become Socinians ; and though many of them do not stop here in the career of unbelief , they still frequent the meeting houses , and are numbered among the sect . With these all the hydra brood 0 / Arianism and Pelagianism , and all the Anticalvinist Dissenters have united ;
each preserving its own peculiar tenet 3 but all agreeing in their abhorrence of Calvinism , their love of unbounded freedom of opimon , and in consequence their hostility to any church establishment . All , however , by this union
and still niore by the medley of doctrines which are preached as the pulpit happens to be filled by a minister of one persuasion or the other , are insensibly modified and assimilated to each other , and this assimilation will
probably become complete , as the older members , who were more rigidly trained in the orthodoxy of heterodoxy , drop off . A body -will remain respectable for riches , numbers , erudition and talents , but without zeal and without generosity ; and they will fall
asunder at no very remote period , because they do not afford their minister * stipends sufficient for the decencies of life . The church must be kept together by a golden chain ; and this which is typically true of the true church is literally applicable to every false one . Therse sectarians call themselves the
enlightened part of the Dissenters ; but the children of Mammon are wiser in their generation thaji such children of light . — -From this party , therefore , the church of England has nothing to fear , though of late years its hostility lias been errinely directed against
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500 Reopening Oidbury Chapel . — English Unitarians
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1807, page 500, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2384/page/48/
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