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munity , who are best able to afford advice and assistance . Unhappily a misdirection of that divine principle of benevolence , which is so strongly inculcated in the gospel that no Christian nation has yet been found altogether uninfluenced by it , has fostered the very evils intended to be removed : it has depressed
and degraded , instead of elevating , the objects of its bounty ; and converted poverty , which in a well-constituted society would be a mere accident of individual position , and fraught with the best moral effects , into pauperism , the permanent characteristic of an immense and increasing class , sunk in the lowest immorality and wretchedness . Such have been the effects of the actual
administration of our own poor laws , and of that indiscriminate almsgiving , which a vague application of the letter of Christianity has too often substituted in place of an enlightened exercise of its spirit . In the present state of society , our existing means of moral and religious instruction rarely extend to those classes who stand most in need of them , and to whom the benevolent founder of our religion peculiarly addressed himself—the forlorn , outcast , and
abandoned . In our great towns the churches and chapels are well filled with the educated and respectable , while the inferior streets _ , the alleys , and the suburbs are deformed every Sunday by scenes of drunkenness and brutality , utterly disgraceful to a country that calls itself civilized . The all-pervading spirit of aristocracy has penetrated into our religious institutions ;—they are too glaringly invested with the pretensions of rank and wealth ;—they are
repellent of the kindly and generous sympathies of brotherly love ;—and they do not provide , even to the degree that may be seen in some Catholic countries , for that humbling and equalizing of all human distinctions in the presence of the supreme and universal Father , which is at once the most salutary and the most sublime of all the influences of public worship . Even in the arrangements of private families we sometimes witness more consideration for the devotions of the master and the mistress than of the servants .
as if the factitious distinctions of this world stretched into the momentous interests of eternity , or could influence the free , impartial communications of the Creator ' s mercy . Who must not have been struck with the inconsistency of the spectacle often exhibited at the doors of some fashionable church at the west end of the metropolis , where the servants may be seen waiting for hours * like excluded heathens , exposed to the worst influences of profane and licentious conversation ; while the noble , the educated , and
the rich are enjoying within the privilege of the sanctuary , the luxury of their religion ! Should these things be ? We do not say that religion is not as necessary for the rich as for the poor ; we only contend , that it is not more necessary ; we believe , that it is equally necessary , and may be made e jually delightful and consolatory , to both . But the rich have sources of comfort and admonition in books , in facilities of intercourse with the enlightened
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Educated Classes to the Poor . 727
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X ¥ 2
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1833, page 727, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2624/page/67/
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