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Untitled Article
nobfest and most delightful exercise . But stop—for which ewt © f the Established * Churches of this kingdom jreti a * 6 destined , you are required , previous to ycrar discharge or any part of the ^ ministerial duty , ( anil in one of
the English Universities , immediately on your entrance upon College , at an age when it is morally impossible that the generality of students can have made an accurate personal investigation , ) to declare your unfeigned assent and consent to certain creeds , articles
or confessions , drawn up in the infancy of the Protestant churches , by men just emerged from the dark night of- Popery , designed to exhibit the state of their convictions concerning the truths of the Christian religion .
It is scarcely to be expected , that the eminently conscientious and pious persons who were employed in framing them , and who deemed them calculated to subserve the purposes of Christian Reformation at that time ,
ever imagined that they would be treated with the superstitious reverence which is too generally attributed to them ; nay , they would have been utterly astonished if they could have foreseen this in the nineteenth
century , i . e . for more than two centuries and a half after their deaths ; when the subject of religion in all its branches has been more fully discussed in every nation of Europe , the original languages of the Bible have continued to be cultivated with vigour , every conceivable inquiry has been made into Eastern manners and customs
calculated to illustrate this volume ; when the collision of numerous sects , during the whole of this interval , has compelled each party to examine critically the original records ; when a progress , at that time unexpected , has been
made in the collation of MSS ., and the correction , upon principles of philosophical criticism , of the Received Text , so as to make it approach as near as we can almost ever expect to bring it , to the state of the apostolic autographs ; and when ( an observation which I hold to be inferior to
none of the preceding ) the general intellect of Europe has been carried to a vastly higher degree of culture ; when art and science have received from human talent and industry their appropriate impulse ; and when , in respect of the doctrines of Christi-
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anity *—nay , the truth of our most holy faith itself—^ -the celebrated maxim /* to think what we will , and to speak what we think /* has here been completely realized . It would almost exceed he .
lief , that at this auspicious period of the Christian Church , the candidates for the ministry in either of the Establishments of this country—and , with wonderful inconsistency , the same may be affirmed of the principal bodies of Scottish Dissenters—are required to
profess unfeigned assent and consent , in the most solemn manner , to the very words which the wisdom of a Knox , a Cranmer , or a Ridley , teach ; —when if the candidate , with all
possible sincerity , intelligence and seriousness , declare his unfeigned belief in the Bible revelation , such a declaration is not to be considered as qualifying him to teach the religion of the Bible in these Churches . You must
profess your Christian faith m the very words which were , without any such ill design , written by men as fallible as yourself , as weak as yourself , and whose opportunities of coming to the knowledge of pure Christian truth were greatly inferior to those which you yourself enjoy .
And here I sh ^ ll bring together a number of facte connected with our subject , which it is important that we should bear in mind . This method of requiring subscription to human creeds , as before observed , appears to have originated with
the Protestants themselves . The very persons who often talk of the monstrous doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope , Cor , according to the . version of modern Catholics , the infallibility of the Church , ; seem not to be aware of this ; and the Protestant world do
not sufficiently consider that a better provision is made in-the Catholic Establishment for the gradual discovery of truth , in regard to the Scriptures . And it may be doubted
whether a large part of the really learned and pious of the clergy of the Catholic communion , may not bear a close comparison with the generality of our Protestant clergy , in regard to the reasonableness of their doctrines , and
the clearness of their vie % vs of the design of the Bible . There can be no doubt , at any rate , that at the era of the Reformation , one of the very first men for mental cultivation and en-
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132 Th * Nonconformist . No . XXIX .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1826, page 132, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2546/page/4/
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