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Untitled Article
This chapter concludes with a vigorous plea for the relief of English Dissenters from church-rates , of the country generally from tithes , and for the complete divorce of church and state . Chap . xvii . relates to episcopal income , university endowments , pluralities , ecclesiastical courts , and clerical exactions . The following eloquent passage is occasioned by the enormous fees for funerals and for the consecration (!) of even the smallest portion of ground for the purposes of interment therein .
4 Among the lesser evils of the system are the consecration of burial-grounds , and what are called surplice fees . Nothing is more illustrative of the spirit of priestcraft than that the church should have kept up the superstitious belief in the consecration of ground in the minds of the people to the present hour , and that , in spite of education , the poor and the rich should be ridden with the most preposterous notion that they cannot lie in peace except in ground over
which the bishop has said his mummery , and for which he and his rooks , as Sir David Lindsay calls them , have pocketed the fees , and laughed in their sleeves at the gullible foolishness of the people . When will the day come when the webs of the clerical spiders shall be torn not only from the limbs but the souls of men ? Does the honest Quaker sleepless sound , or will he arise less cheerfully at the judgmentday from his grave , over which no prelatical jugglery has been
practised , and for which neither prelate nor priest has pocketed a doit ? Who has consecrated the sea , into which the British sailor in the cloud of battle-smoke descends , or who goes down , amidst the tears of his comrades , to depths to which no plummet but that of , God ' s omnipresence ever reached ? Who has consecrated the battle-field , which opens its pits for its thousands and tens of thousands ; or the desert , where the wearied traveller lies down to his eternal rest ?
Who has made holy the sleeping place of the solitary missionary , and of the settlers in new lands ? Who but He whose hand has hallowed earth from end to end , and from surface to centre , for his pure and almighty fingers have moulded it ! Who but He whose eye rests on it day and night , watching its myriads of moving children , the oppressors and the oppressed , the deceivers and the deceived , the hypocrites , and the poor whose souls are darkened with false
knowledge and fettered with the bonds of daring selfishness ? And on whatever innocent thing that eye rests , it is hallowed beyond the breath of bishops and the fees of registrars . Who shall need to look for a consecrated spotof earth to lay his bones in . when the struggles and the sorrows , the prayers and the tears of our fellow-men , from age to age , have consecrated every atom of this world ' s surface to the desire of a repose which no human hands can lead to , no human rites can secure ? Who shall seek for a more hallowed bed than the
bosom of that earth into which Christ himself descended , and ia which the bodies of thousands of glorious patriots , and prophets , and martyrs , who were laid in gardens , and beneath their paternal trees , and of heroes whose blood and sighs have flowed forth for their fellowmen , have been left to peace and the blessings of grateful generations with no rites , no sounds , but the silent falling of tears and the aspirations of speechless , but immortal thanks ? From side to aide ,
Untitled Article
504 History of Priestcraft .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1833, page 504, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2618/page/64/
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