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people get peculiarly sensitive as to the payment of imposts , and just at this time the clergy have revived claims long laid in abeyance , exacting the tithe of poor men ' s labour , who by their utmost exertions can scarce keep body and soul together . Cupidity has driven the black priests mad ; they call themselves Christians , and forget that
Christ expressly said his kingdom was not of this world . They are the buyers and sellers of their flocks , and their flocks will cast them out . We might almost suppose the priests mad , and bent upon setting the hand of every man against them ; bent upon setting the labouring people to destroy them like wolves or rats , or other vermin ,
but Christian charity would rather induce us to believe that their object , as ministers of the gospel , is to set the question of tithes in so full a light , that all its hideous deformity may be at once perceived , and thus secure the prompt abolition of such a swollen mischief . A halfstarving man to be robbed of the tithe of his earnings ! It is not in human nature to bear this patiently .
Father , 'who are those boys walking in a long train , in strange looking garments ? They are a portion of a large class called charity boys , ' a designation which I hope will ere long be known only to antiquarians . They are specimens of the wisdom of our ancestors , which has descended upon our hereditary legislators , who think that the things of this world are not progressive , and therefore that rules may be made which shall
last for all time . Look at that hideous garb ! It is of the fashion of the day when the original founder first gave his money to establish the school . His short wit could not see that fashions would alter , and he made a set of absurd regulations as unalterable as those of the Medes and Persians , and the breaking through of which would incur a forfeiture of the property which maintains the school . Look at the garb
again . That detestable thing called a coat , unsightly and cramping to the free movements of the body , is made of a material only manufactured for that specific school , and which costs three times the price of numerous better-looking fabrics now in common use . Look at the cap of worsted , a name which would seem to imply that nothing could be worse . It neither serves as a cover nor as a shade , neither to
replace the hair which has been shorn to the quick , nor to hide the unseemly want of it , which makes the poor boys look like something between felons and soldiers . Arid the absurd nether garments , which recall De Foe ' s satire vividly to
us' In clouted iron shoes and sheepskin breeches . * Fancy the poor boys wetted to the skin in this rainy atmosphere , and that yellow sheepskin—previous to greasing—with as great an affinity for moisture as any deliquescent salt , obstinately refusing- to cease to resemble uncooked triue for a whole month . Why even the
troopers have been rescued from the misery , and are now clad in a material of warp and woof . Yet a profound respect for the will of a man who died some three hundred years back , still confines a number of poor boys to the garb of mountebanks , and probable ill health . How admirably tho 9 e coarse and close fitting worsted' stockings are adapted to catch the driving shower in their meshes , and convey it to
Untitled Article
Juvenile Lessons . 689
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1833, page 689, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/29/
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