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Untitled Article
one falsehood by another * For throughout the ceremonies there are vestiges of feudalism and church authority , which are now quite as obsolete , and as alien from our feelings and habits , as the notion of an elective monarchy . The real business of the day was the administration of the coronation oath . Even this , to our taste , would have been better dispensed with . But it is the custom of the country . We are a swearing people . An oath is the introduction to all offices , great and small , lasting or temporary , from a
lord-chancellor to a petty juryman . We swear in a king and we swear in a constable . The time will come , we hope , when men will perceive , that their duties are not contingent upon these adjurations . They tend to keep up a false notion , that of voluntary compact . They are supposed to represent a sort of double bargain which the swearer makes , with his fellow-creatures on the one hand , and with the Deity on the other . And allowing the practice , the time seems to be ill chosen . The King has been king for the last
fourteen months as much as he ever can or will be . No new prerogatives are conferred upon him , no fresh obligations devolve upon him ; his rights and his duties are altogether unchanged . The fitting time for all oaths of office is the moment when the first assumption is made of regal authority . There ia a still more serious objection , and one which will every year grow stronger and stronger . It applies not only to the oath , although to that
pre-eminently , but to the spirit of the religious services generally which accompany the coronation . They are sectarian ; they are imbued and polluted with the peculiar dogmatism of a party . Let the service be Christian , for the country over which the King is to reign is generally and professedly Christian - , but for that very reason , because the country is Christian , the service ought not to be sectarian . Newspaper reporters are not , we
suppose , at home in such matters , and not so implicitly to be trusted as they may be on a criminal trial or a parliamentary debate ; but they have certainly reported one very extraordinary prayer or benediction , commencing with the strange phrase , " God , the Son of God . ' * His Majesty ' s idolatrous subjects in Hindostan will be curious to know more of the genealogy and pedigree of his deities . A national act of worship ought surely to be restricted to the devotion and the forms of our common Christianity . But the
oath itself is the great triumph of Episcopacy . The church must have chuckled over its invention . " The oath ' s the thing In which I'll catch the conscience of the King . "
By it the church attempts to bind the sovereign to the wheels of her chariot . After a sermon , ( we shall give some account of the Bishop of London ' s oration next month , ) in which the people are exhorted to serve the sovereign , the sovereign is sworn to serve the church . We insert this oftencited oath , for the terms of it ought never to be forgotten until they have been finally abrogated .
Untitled Article
Politics of the MoMh . 707
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1831, page 707, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2602/page/55/
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