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Untitled Article
ance between Church and State is here traced back from Episcopacy to Popery , and from Popery to Heathenism . It is true that the patriarchs
possessed both a temporal and a spiritual chieftainship over their households , and that Judaism was at ance a religion and a form of civil govern- * - ment . But there were temporary reasons for this peculiarity . It only existed during the progress of a supernatural dispensation which terminated in Christ . His gospel was preached to individuals ; he shewed to maa a way of salvation irrespective of the decrees of his temporal sovereign , or of
the prevailing religion , whatever it might be , of the community or nation to which he belonged . An union of Church and State is no where en * joined , and does not appear ever to have been contemplated by Christ or his apostles . Of that union , under the peculiar form in which it then existed in Judaism , they pronounced the final abolition ; they gave no iritis
mation of its revival in any other form ; and till the conversion of Constantine it only existed in Heathenism , from which it was then transplanted into a Christianity which had become sufficiently corrupt for its reception , and which by that reception speedily became yet more corrupt . It was the offspring of demoralizing superstition , adopted by an , apostate church , and transmitted to an imperfect and nominal reformation .
Chapter HI . shews the Establishment founded in error , from an exhibition of its characteristic features . Of these the author specifies and illustrates four : i . e . 1 st , an unjust tax for the maintenance of the clergy ; 2 nd , an unjust premium upon a particular sect ; 3 rd , a virtual punishment of Dissenters ; 4 th , a debasing subjection of the Christian Church to secular
power and authority . Paley contended , that if men were not compelled by legislative enactment to contribute towards the maintenance of a clergy , many would relinquish public worship to save their money , and religion be forgotten in the
country . But although taxation may prevent a man's forgetting a religion by obliging him to pay for it , it may be doubted whether this kind of reminiscence is the most favourable either to devotion or to charity . He will not frequent an unattractive service merely because he is an involuntary contributor . The irreligious are left as they were , and the religious have always shewn themselves both able and willing to support the worship in which they delighted , and the ministry from which they derived spiritual
benefit , and even to make provision for the instruction of their neighbours . Religion is not forgotten in America . In no country is its influence more extensively , if so extensively fek . And its support is almost wholly derived from voluntary contribution . The Dissenters of this country bear cheerfully the additional burden of maintaining the ministers of their choice ; and were the Establishment annihilated to-morrow , they , together with the
pious members of that Church , would without difficulty sustain an apparatus not less efficient than that which now exists for the moral and religious instruction of the community . " In Ireland , notwithstanding the
Untitled Article
The' Chuwh Establishment / bunded in Error . & 1 &
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1831, page 519, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2600/page/15/
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