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against the uprightness and love of truth of those who rejected him * He knew too the hearts and the lives of those who surrounded him , and saw distinctly in their envy , ambition , worldliness , sensuality , the springs of their unbelief ; and accordingly he pronounced it a crime . Since that period what changes have taken place ! Jesus Christ has left the world . His miracles are events of a remote age ,
and the proofs of them , though abundant , are to many imperfectly known ; and what is incomparably more important , his religion has undergone corruption , adulteration , disastrous change , and its likeness to its founder is in no small degree effaced . The clear , consistent , quickening truth , which came from the lips of Jesus , has been exchanged for a hoarse jargon and vain babblings . The stream , so pure at the fountain , has been polluted and poisoned through its
whole course . Not only has Christianity been overwhelmed by absurdities , but by impious doctrines , which have made the universal Father now a weak and vain despot , to be propitiated by forms and flatteries , and now an Almighty torturer , fore-ordaining multitudes of his creatures to guilt , and then glorifying liis justice by their everlasting woe . When I think what Christianity has become in the hands of politicians and priests , how it has crushed the human soul for ages ,
how it has struck the intellect with palsy ann haunted the imagination with superstitious phantoms , how it has broken whole nations to the yoke , and frowned on every free thought ; when I think how , under almost every form of this religion , its ministers have taken it into their own keeping , have hewn and compresseditinto theshapeof rigid creeds , and have then pursued by menaces of everlasting woe whoever would
question the divinity of these works of their hands ; when I consider , in a word , how , under such influences , Christianity has been and still is exhibited , in forms which shock alike the reason , conscience , and heart , I feel deeply , painfully , what a different system it is from that which Jesus taught , and I dare not apply to unbelief the terms of condemnation which belonged to the infidelity of the primitive age .
' Perhaps I ought to go further . Perhaps I ought to say , that to reject Christianity under some of its corruptions is rather a virtue than a crime . At the present moment , I would ask , whether it is a vice to doubt the truth of Christianity as it is manifested in Spain and Portugal ? When a patriot in those benighted countries , who knows Christianity only as a buLwark of despotism , as a rearer of inquisitions , as a
stern jailer immuring wretched women in the convent , as an executioner stained and reeking with the blood of the friends of freedom ; I say , when the patriot , who sees in our religion the instrument of these crimes and woes , believes and affirms that it is not from God , are we
authorized to charge his unbelief on dishonesty and corruption of mind , and to brand him as a culprit ? May it not be that the spirit of Christianity in his heart emboldens him to protest with his lips against what bears the name ? And if he thus protest , through a deep sympathy with the oppressions and sufferings of his race , is he
not nearer the kingdom of God , than the priest and inquisitor who boastingly and exclusively assume the Christian name ? Jesus Christ has told us that " this is the condemnation" of the unbelieving , " that they love darkness rather than light ; " and who does not see , that this ground of condemnation is removed , just in proportion as th , ©
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184 Channing > $ Serntora .
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1833, page 134, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2608/page/66/
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