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upon tbe Ever-Memorable Two Thousand Ministers : we Chink , however , that he is misled by certain unfavourable appearances when he pronounces that ; tbe spirit of liberty fled with them or ttieir immediate descendants . ITiey
established a principle of freedom , which their descendants have not only maintained but applied to an extent of which they never thought . The Protestant Dissenters of England in the present day are , we are bold to say , a more numerous party of steady
friends to true liberty , both civil and religious , than ever before existed either in this or any other country . The " Plain Speaker" might have been expected to know this ; but in the flrghts of his imagination he has
overlooked the people from amongst whom he sprung , and is sighing after a state of public thinking and feeling , which he would find realized , if he could survey the world soberly , in the character of that very people .
<( We hare heard a great deal of the pulpit eloquence of Bossuet and other celebrated preachers of the time of .. Fenelon ; but I doubt much whether all of them together could produce any number of passages to match the best of those in the Holy Living and Dying , or even
Baxter ' s severe but thrilling denunciations of the insignificance and nothingness of life and the certainty of a judgment to come . There is a fine portrait of this last-mentioned powerful controversialist , with his high forehead and black velvet cap , in Calamy ' s Nonconformists' Memorial , containing an account , of the two
thousand Ejected Ministers at the Restoration of Charles If . This was a proud list for Old England ; and the account ef their lives , their zeal , their eloquence and sufferings for conscience * sake , is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of the human mind . How high it can soar in faith ! How nobly it can arm itself with resolution and
fortitude ! How far it tan surpass itself in cruelty and fraud ! How incapable it seems to bv of good except as it is urged on by ( he contention with evil [ The retired atid inflexible descendants of the two thousand Ejected Ministers and their
adherents are gone with the spirit of persecution that gave a aoul and body to ifoen ); and with them , I am afraid , the spirit of liberty , of manly independence , anci of iowaiq self-respect , is nearly exfingulshec ) in England . —if . 3 ( H , 302 . We add a furious note from II , 78 ,
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which is quite m the writer ' s peculiar manner : r " During the peace of Amieas , ' * young English officer , of the name of Lovelace , was presented at Buonaparte ' s levee . Instead of the usual question 1 Where have you served , Sir ? ' The
first Consul 1 mm mediately addressed him ' I perceive your name . Sir , is the same as that of the hero of Richardson ' s Raman ce V Here was a Consul ! The young man ' s uncle who was called
Lovelace , told me this anecdote whilst we were stopping together at Calais . I had also been thinking that his was the same uame as that of the hero of Richardson ' s romance . This is one of my reasons for liking Buonaparte /*
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384 On the Moral Principle .
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Edgbaston , near Birmingham , Sin , July 1 , 1 § 26 . WITHIN the last six : months , two cases have occurred in this town of public delinquency of such magnitude as to astonish arid distress every sincere friend to virtue , and of
such notoriety as to leave no proba . bility of misconception in allusion to the facts . The erring" parties were both of them of high consideration in the esteem of their fellow-townsmen , of long-tried apparent integrity , of
active and intelligent worth ; both of them , perhaps , nearly fifty years of age , if not all out , and both zealous in the dissemination of their respective religious opinions , though differing as widely from each other as the joint name of Christians can allow . I will
not suppose that religion has in either case been assumed as a cloak for deception ; from my own knowledge of them , their domestic virtues I believe to have been as exemplary as the public confidence in them was firm and unbounded . How then shall we
attempt to account for such a lamentable falling off- —such a total dereliction of principle ? It was no sudden impulse of youthful passion , no ebullition of momentary feeling which the rigid moralist might be disposed to palliate or forgive , but a continued
and systematic course of misconduct , which nothing but the shame of exposure could have so long protracted . The first step no doubt was painful , and the succeeding and increasing guilt adds another proof to universal observation , that the * human tnind ' can by degrees harden itself to any atro ~ citv . For , once pass the boundary ol
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1826, page 384, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2550/page/4/
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