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bear in feature , sentiment and language to their parent ; but such men stem studious to display their degeneracy , or rather to record ihtiv spurious descent from the Mottieroj Haricts . tilth "whom the kings of I he earth have committed fornication . * They glory in their shame .
True honour is paid to the reformers not b ' v him who remains fixed -to the spot vvliiehthey had reached centuries ago ; and who ^ from this ' -i * oirowed eminence , assails with reproach all that are looking forward to farther progress , —but by him who reveres
them as admirable patterns , but dares not to give himself up to them as infallible guides ; who is animated by their spirit , and invigorated with their principles ; who is a follower of them , as
for as he conceives them to have been followers of Christ . To the bigot , who styles himself their champion , while he is , in fact , reversing their maxims and calumniating their characters , the shades of these holy men 4 would say , could we call them up from their Ct
quiet abodes , —With your mind and temper , you . would have been the first to oppose , to slander and to persecute us , had you lived in our day of peril and rebuke . In the time oi the first publication of the gospel in these lands , you would have stood up for the established impieties of heathenism , and have hurried the founders of our faith to prison and to death . At Athens , you would have poisoned Socrates ; at Jerusalem , would have crucified Jesus . Oh ! yc-children of pride and prejudice ! y « votaries of this world ' s policy !
JUv . vii . % y and 5 .
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ye advocates of the eternity of er * ror ! Ye be witnesses unto your * stives j that ye are the offspring of them which killed the reformers and the prophets . Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers . "
Considered in airy other light then as the precedent and begin , ning of a series of improvements of the same kind , the Reformation loses all its significancy , propriety and value ; and can be esteemed
nothing better than a lawless re . hellion or a pernicious schism . It involves an absurdity to sup . pose that it exploded ode arbi . trary system of faith , only to establish another ; and implicates the reformers in presumption and folly to imagine that they deter , mined that no one hereafter should
imitate their own example , and that the narrow step which they had taken out of the region of error was the goal of perfection , and should be the boundary of the human mind .
Sufficient was it for them to ox . plore the path of knowledge ; to their posterity it belongs to pursue it * Glorious was their design of emerging from intellectual darkness * heroic their
determitiation to follow the light of truth ; and the most eloquent panegyrick we can pass upon tfaeif memories , is to act upon their principles , and to complete their plans . But les us not * at the same time ,
mistake their merit and misapply our praise . It is the boldness of the design , rather than the comp leteness of its execution , which demands our admiration and applause ; and they must be regarded as our benefactors , less on account of the acquisitions which they have bequeathed , than W example of mrntal independence
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164 The Reformation a Precedent of Refdrtn .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1811, page 164, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2414/page/36/
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