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    beauty , —its power in emancipating the' understanding and ameliorating the affections , and its beauty in the views which it presents *• of repentance , and righteousness , and pardon , and conversion , and heaven /' " It is the proper business of theology to form , and cherish , and develop ,

    and stimulate to their greatest achievements , the highest orders of human intellect . Instead of which , modern theology puts fetters on the soul at the

    very portals of the temple , and thinks God honoured by the clanking of these mental chains . The writers who have most graced religion , in an intellectual view , have either been rebellious to the creed imposed on them , ( Taylor denied oiiginal sin , Barrow opposed particular redemption , ) or , like Milton , Locke , and Newton , their minds were trained in another school , and they brought to theology the vigour which had been nursed by physical ,

    mental , or political science . To impress a foreigner with an exalted , with a correct notion of what the human intellect had been , and had done , in these countries , who would think of selecting our theology ? You might take for such a purpose , in a mass , our poets , our philosophers , our statesmen ; they would each shew that we are * sprung of earth ' s best blood , have titles manifold , ' but no one would dare to put forward our theology . This alone is sufficient to shew that there is something essentially wrong . That wrong I take to be the prevalence of a theology which suppresses thought , by threatening mental error with the penalty of eternal damnation . I know that this system appeals to the Scriptures . I also know that it is only supported by the perversion of the Scriptures . I could shew that whenever faith and salvation are connected there , either the faith is a moral quality , not an intellectual act - , or the salvation is only a prophecy of temporal deliverance , and not the promise of an eternal heaven . But this is beside my present purpose , and would require discussion far beyond the limits of a sermon . I am only now urging the fact that revelation speaks to man through his reason ; and instead of limiting and quelling that reason by telling him that any of its honest conclusions can be a crime to be eternally punished , requires that every man judge what is said , and be ' fully persuaded in his own mind . ' It is in proportion as the intellect is left thus free from the bias of hope or fear , that it flourishes * n any department . Our noblest species of literature is our philosophy ; the second our poetry ; the third politics ; the last our theology . In each truth is the object ; truth in the first , as to the laws of matter and of mind : in the second , truth of description , feeling-,

    and character ; in the third , truth as to the tendencies of institutions and measures ; in the last , truth concerning God , duty , and futurity . The order of their excellence is precisely that of the degree of mental freedom , freedom from the prospect of reward or punishment as to particular conclusions , which exists in them respectively . There is little or nothing to bias in philosophy . In poetry there are the taste , the passions , and prejudices of the

    time , so far as these deviate from the common and permanent sympathies of humanity . In politics there are great temporal interests involved . And iu religion there are terrors which few minds can resist , incessantly directed against denial , or even doubt , and therefore against investigation . Heuce the order of excellence reverses the order of importance . Hence the tinu ~

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    Sermons nt the Anniversary of the Irish Unitarian Society . 671

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• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1831, page 671, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2602/page/19/