On this page

• Text (1)

  Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

  • 

    Untitled Article

• Transcript

  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

    Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.

    Untitled Article

    thine > If benevolence and piety , much of both has been heard by the hearing of the ear . Yet where is the series of publications issued by thy prelates fo * the instruction of the many ? Such exist , but they come not from the university nor the cathedral . And over these thy sectarian spirit has breathed a baneful influence . Carefully do they exclude the topics

    which have an immediate bearing on the duties of actual life , because religion and politics have been filled with the narrow spirit of a Church which felt that the unprejudiced pursuit of knowledge would dissever its connexion with the State , and destroy the errors which were blended with the essence of its constitution . Yet thpu complainest of the ignorance of the people , and of the excesses to which that ignorance leads . Thou seest them vicious , and drawest from the sight a justification of the contempt which it excites in thy breast . Rather should every token of ignorance and vice smite thee with self-reproach . If they prevail , what hast thou done

    to prevent their growth ? If the people are ignorant , it is thy work ; if they are vicious , it is because they are ignorant . Unpardonable is the neglect of which thou hast been guilty . It was thy duty to impart information , to avert vice and misery . Thy profession declares thy duty—thy leisure ,

    thy education , thy temporal ease , each declare thy duty . Christianity and the accountability of each of thy sons , called on thee to act the part of the good Samaritan , and thou hast , instead , been the Priest and the Levite : True is it that many of the people have risen to conditions of wide usefulness , ample honour and affluence . Yes , they have done incomparably more for their own class , for the bulk of the nation , that is , than thou with all the retinue and splendour of thy hierarchy . But their good they have themselves fabricated without thy aid , in spite of thy neglect and opposition , and by the sole force of theft * own virtue . The people have been their own teachers and their own friends in most of the real good they have been able to acquire . Where then is thy utility ? What else hast thou been but a check to education ? For what do I allow thee to appropriate annually to thyself millions of money which might reward the industrious , assuage the evils of penury , give a new impulse to the productive powers of the nation , originate institutions for the universal instruction of the people—for what ? Certainly not for thy merits in furthering popular instruction .

    Nor is thy merit greater in the higher branches of education . In how many cases is the receipt of the rich endowments of thy universities the only labour they perform , who , because by their office they are required to know and teach , are emphatically called Professors , And while the munificence of former ages is turned away from its proper object , in aiding the acquisition of knowledge , to enrich and effeminate a favoured few , all the real knowledge that is to be acquired in thy colleges must be paid for out of the students' own resources . The highest honours of these universities , designed as they were for the furtherance-of knowledge , are found to

    Untitled Article

    830 Hie Question between the Nation and the Church .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1831, page 830, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2604/page/34/