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Untitled Article
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Untitled Article
much added to his little sum of enjoyment , which little this writer would willingly abridge , I fear ; but bless his simplicity , ( or his profundity , which is it ?) he unwittingly counteracts his own design . It is a Punch ' s pathos , and sets the spectators in a merry grin . I beg his acceptance of my thanks for the mirth he has afforded me .
In his preface be informs us his mission to write arose from * the fearful and unnatural absence of any kind of religious principle , indeed of any high moral principle whatever , in Miss Martineau ' s Illustrations of Political Economy / from her ' Socinianism / and her declaration , in a prize essay , that * the practice of righteousness is not essentially connected with anyreligious belief . ' *
Whether Miss Martineau here means any particular religious belief , or not , is of no consequence . But if he insist on it , that the necessity of what he calls religious belief is an indispensable article in the creed of Christianity , I will tell him that article must be expunged from the creed , whatsoever may be its source , before Christianity of conduct and feeling can pervade this or any other nation .
That , and two or three other dogmas must be entirely obliterated ; they induce the continuation of a system of education and moral training which make the loveliest injunctions of the great teacher , impracticable and impossible . But , again , can he see no religious , truly religious not dogmatically religious , tendency in Miss Martineau \ s writings ? In pages 67 and 68 of Sowers not Reapers ,
there is more of the veritable spirit of Christianity , than in the whole of the rev . gentleman ' s pages put together . The tendency of all she has written is Christian justice and an extension of God ' s blessings to the poor . He , perhaps , may say Chatham , a quarry man—a delver of mill-stones , is a fictitious character . ' Such a reasoner , such an intellectual being cannot
be found among that class of people . ' Again I tell Mr . Tayler he is utterly ignorant of the minds of those to whom his book is professedly addressed . Miss Martineau has done them simple justice in her estimate of them . When the Rev . Charles B . Tayler has learned how to estimate them , he may hope to write to the mechanics more persuasively . P . V .
* It grieves him ' to see this essay constantly advertised on the covers of her Illustrations of Political Economy . ' Yet be follows the example in advertising his own works on the cover of this Tale .
Untitled Article
Social Evils and their Remedy . 743
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1833, page 743, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2626/page/11/
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