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Untitled Article
danger of its misapplication is taken info account , the only safe rule is to forbid the legislature ' s listening to any circumstances of temporary expediency as a justification for the exclusion of men from trust and power on account of religious opinion . Even the instance of the Test Act during the reigns of Charles II . and James IF ., cited by Mr . Hallam in support of his exception ,
is , in fact , a strong proof of the dangerous tendency of such an exception . The only true ground upon which the Catholics of that day were excluded from power , was , that they nourished political principles at variance with the well-being of the state . It happened , indeed , that those who cherished these arbitrary designs were , for the most part , persons professing the Catholic faith ; but it was not because a man believed in the doctrine of transubstantiation that he was rendered unfit to hold office—it was because he was a
j nan likely to abuse that office in order to serve the arbitrary purposes of the court . The test , therefore , if a test indeed was necessary , should have been a political , and not a religious test . What has been the consequence of admitting the exception in this particular instance ? That now , when the ill-understood causes of that exception have , in fact , passed away ; when the religion remains , but the political principle x > f which it was made the test is
gone , the prejudice remains unchanged and unchangeable in the imaginations of many even of our most celebrated statesmen , who , claiming the benefit of Mr . Hallam ' s maxim , assert that the country is still in those circumstances which render " the exclusion of dissidents from trust and power conducive to the well-being of the stale . " Thus dangerous is it to engraft arbitrary qualifications upon the great guiding rules of political philosophy .
In studying the history of the Reformation , and indeed of all religious controversies , nothing is more striking than the undue weight which has always been attached to opinions merely speculative . On this point Mr . Hallam makes the following sensible observations : " It has very rarely been the custom of theologians to measure the importance of orthodox opinions by their effect upon the lives and hearts of those who adopt them ; nor was this predilection for speculative above practical
doctrines ever more evident than in the leading controversy of the sixteenth century , that respecting the Lord's Supper . No errors on this point could have had any influence on men ' s moral conduct , nor indeed much on the general nature of their faith ; yet it was selected as the test of heresy , and most , if not all , of those who suffered death upon that charge , whether in England or on the Continent , were convicted of denying * the corporal presence in ihe sense of the Roman Church . It had been well if the Reformers had learned
by abhorring her persecution , not to practise it in a somewhat less degree upon each other , or by exposing the absurdities of transubstantiation , not to contend for equal nonsense of their own . " In the same candid and impartial spirit Mr . Hallam observes ,
" There seems to be something in the Roman Catholic discipline ( and I know nothing else bo likely as the practice of confession ) which keeps the balance , as it were , of moral influence pretty even between the two religions , and compensates for the ignorance and superstition which the elder preserves : for I am not sure that the Protestant system in the present age has any very sensible advantage in this respect ; or that , in countries where the comparison can fairly be made , as in Germany or Switzerland , there is more honesty in one sex or more chastity in the other , when they belong to the Reformed churches . " Perhaps it is not to the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church that we are to attribute this equality in morals , but rather to the fact that the moral
Untitled Article
YJ 2 Review , —Hollands Constitutional History of England .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1828, page 172, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2558/page/28/
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