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Untitled Article
disgusting . It is the soul in them for which he is paid . Hence his craft is neither so honest nor so innocent as that of the actor . And his operations become a craft the moment that he affects more than that instruction which can be communicated by a voluntary act , or those expressions of sympathy and other emotions which are really generated in his heart by the scenes he witnesses ,
and which would be so generated though he had no pretensions to a sacred character . The fact is , that there is , in the literal sense of the word , no Christian priesthood , nor can be . We are all priests , or none of us , which comes to the same thing . We elect a teacher and pay him for his teaching . That is all right and useful . If a good teacher , he will most likely be a man of strong
and expansive sympathies ; so much the better ; but if we pretend to pay him for the manifestation of those sympathies , and make that manifestation a portion of his hired duty , we run the risk of entrapping him into the practice of priestcraft , and open a door for some portion of the evil which , as our author shows , has so loner desolated the world .
The commencement of Mr . Howitt ' s work , announcing his design , is in a frank and daring strain . 4 This unfortunate world has been blasted in all ages by two evil principles—kingcraft and priestcraft—that , takingad vantage of human necessities , in themselves not hard—salutary , and even beneficial in their natural operations—the necessity of civil government , and that of spiritual instruction , have warped them cruelly from their own pure
direction , and converted them into the most odious , the most terrible and disastrous scourges of our race . These malign powers have ever begun , as it were , at the wrong end of things . Kingcraft , seizing upon the office of civil government , not as the gift of popular choice , and to be filled for the good of nations , but with the desperate hand of physical violence , has proclaimed that it was not made for man , but man for it : that it possessed an inherent and divine right to rule , to
trample upon men s hearts , to violate their dearest rights , to scatter their limbs and their blood at its pleasure upon the earth ; and in return for its atrocities , to be worshipped on bended knee , and hailed as a God . Its horrors are on the face of every nation ; its annals are written in gore in all civilized climes ; and , where pen never was known , it has scored its terrors in the hearts of millions , and left its traces in deserts of everlasting desolation , and in the ferocious spirits of abused and brutalized hordes . What is all the history of this wretched planet but a mass of its bloody wrath and detestable oppressions , whereby it has converted earth into a hell , men into the worst
of demons , and has turned the human mind from its natural pursuit of knowledge , and virtue , and social happiness , into a career of blind rage , bitter and foolish prejudices ; an entail men t of awful and crimecreating ignorance ; and has held the universal soul of man in the blackest and most pitiable of bondage ? Countless are its historians j we need not add one more to the unavailing catalogue : but of *• That sister-pest , congregator of slaves Into ( he shadow of its pinions wide , "
Untitled Article
History of Priestcraft . 501
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1833, page 501, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2618/page/61/
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