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INTELLIGENCE.
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Eligibility of Unitarians to the Common Council of Dublin . Dublin , Dec . 23 . —The Common Council was specially summoned for yesterday , to take into consideration the Petition of James Shaw , a freeman of the corporation , against the election of Samuel Stephens , one of the sitting members for that Guild .
The Petition was read . After the usual preamble , the Petition proceeded as follows : — tc That said Samuel Stephens , in the year 18 O 2 S caused to be printed and published in the city an Address to the people called Quakers , wherein he has , amongst other things , asserted that our Saviour Jesus Christ was not the power of
God unto salvation , and has used several other disrespectful terms in allusion to our Saviour ; and said Samuel Stephens has distributed same very extensively in this city , and upon being several times charged publicly in the Common Council as the author of the said Address , he did not disavow the same : —and your
Petitioner is prepared with evidence to shew , that said Samuel Stephens is really the author and publisher of said Address . —That your Petitioner humbly trusts your Lordship and Honours , who are deeply interested in the support of the Christian religion , upon which the maintenance of our glorious constitution and the welfare of society so materially depends , will
consider the said work of the said Samuel Stephens to be blasphemous and highly derogatory to the power and divine character of our blessed Saviour , and that the person who was capable of writing and publishing said dangerous doctrine is totafly unfit to have a seat amongst your Lordship and Honours , " &q . &c .
Mr . Sewple thought that the matters contained in the Petition were purely of an ecclesiastical nature , and as such did apt corae under the cognizance of laymen . He himself had been educated in the doctrines of
Athanasius , and continued still to pro . fees and admire them - but he did not the less think , it right that others should adopt different opinions , ox
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that every one should have liberty to profess that which he believed to be the truth ; nor was he ignorant that many persons of very great distinction in the country were tinged with the doctrines at present in question . He besought the Assembly to recollect in what a situation they would place
themselves , should they accede to a Petition founded on such grounds as this : every liberal mind would be shocked , and the enemies of the corporation would seize the opportunity to expose it to the scorn and contempt of the whole world . He should therefore move that the Petition
be returned by the proper officer to James Shaw , from whom it had been presented , Mr . Giffard begged to remind gentlemen of what was really the matter before them ; it was not whether men were to be allowed to
have peculiar opinions in religion , — whether they were to enjoy the right of thinking for themselves—but it was •** whether they were to dare to give these thoughts utterance **;—whether , in short , a person who had been guilty of open blasphemy should be permitted to sit in that Assembly . The question , in
his opinion , resolved itself into the bare matter of fact , " Did the member whose election is objected to , or did he not , publish a . book denying the Divinity of our Saviour ? " If any man , in the vanity of his heart * should send
forth into the world a book affronting the faith of Christendom , wresting from us our dearest hopes and outraging all the feelings of piety , all the doctrines of revelation ; 19 that man to remain unnoticed ? is he
to hold the same honourable rank in society which in due to the followers of pore religion i * Several gentlemen seeni to believe that the whole is an affair of very trivial importance ; I would beg of them to re * fleet on the miseries which have
desolated Europe , ibr < the last twenty years , and then to call to their mind , that from a source like this—small as it may appeal-- —the whole of that scries of calamities drew their origin : they began by attacks on religion—they
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Intelligence.
INTELLIGENCE .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1814, page 127, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2437/page/55/
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