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because it belongs to business , and that , because it belongs to politics , and thus isolating religion from every thing else , and stripping it bare of all its social strength and glory . Whatever benefits men , in any of their relations , that is righteousness and true holiness . " Hence the mischief also of the further separation which religionists make between this world and the world to come . They seem to look for happiness rather in a perpetual act of worship , than in the continued
development of principles which here are the source of goodness and felicity . Their preparation for it is , therefore , in such exercises . Its hope does not
act upon their social conduct . It is not a perpetual impulse to being good and doing good . We do not , and we cannot , trace to their peculiar principles even the great efforts which from time to time are made and making for correcting the errors and evils of the past , and ameliorating the condition of mankind , and leading on the human race in its career of improvement . By mistaking heaven they lose the glory of making earth the heaven into which it might gradually be transformed . O when will men awake from these dreams ? What is sown shall be reaped ; and happy they who go forth bearing precious seed , though it be with toil and tears , amid calumny and opposition and scorn , for the result shall be found after many days , and the good of earth may gladden them even in heaven /'—Pp . 27—30 .
. These are the aspects under which religious truth should be presented , in order to emancipate multitudes and regenerate nations .
The other advocate , whose energies are ever employed in adding fresh impulses to the cause , has been guided in the choice of his subject by bis knowledge , that those whom he addressed had to contend with the superstitious conceptions of the character of God , which are embodied in the popular theology both of England and of Ireland . Our estimate of the supreme importance of the subject enhances our regret that , glowing as this discourse is in the warmth of conviction , and eloquent in the enforcement of much truth , and , in its entire character , raised far above any defences of Calvinism which can be framed , it is yet not wholly triumphant . In arguing with Calvinists respecting guilt and punishment , there is no stopping short of the great principle which they so egregiously pervert , — that all things are of and through God , and that no power but his is at work , directly or indirectly , through the whole universe . Our business with them is to shew that the principle yields no such results as are found in their doctrine of predestination , and to display its genuine inferences . Any argument which trespasses on the principle itself may be clearly shewn to
involve a sophism . Such a failure we find in the beautiful passage ( p . 15 ) which describes a parent ' s relenting towards a repentant child . The analogy between the earthly and the heavenly parent is sufficiently complete for the purposes of the original parable ; but we have no warrant for its extension
to all the relations which the name includes * If the father of the prodigal had sent his son into the midst of evils ,, which he positively foreknew and could have prevented , his reception of him would have tjorne a different ,
Untitled Article
674 Sermons at the Anniversary of-the Irish Unitarian Society .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1831, page 674, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2602/page/22/
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