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Untitled Article
viduals . Any thing would do for a painter then , as any thing will do for a parson now , provided there be a living in the family . Professorships of painting would be sold , by public auction or private contract , would be advertised in the newspapers , would become payment of tutorships for the sons , and marriage portions
for the daughters . No doubt the art would flourish greatly . Who would not laugh to scorn the appeal to all lovers of the art to uphold such a system ? Who would not despise the barefaced trick to enrich a class , which could only depress the taste it pretended to cherish ? To form a painter there must be an original fitness , an organic susceptibility to the beauty and harmony of
colours , and the fancy , invention , judgment , without which only servile copying or tasteless combination can be expected instead of design . All the endowed professorships in the world would only do mischief without previous selection . But that mischief is trifling compared with the evil of an endowed priesthood
without previous selection . I he needful qualities , in the latter case , are just as rare . The Dissenters try to find them . Hence the hold which their preachers have upon the community . The minister has access to the minds of his people , from the wealthiest to the poorest , from the most educated to the most ignorant ; arid he generally knows how to turn that facility to account . We
do not mean by this contrast to bestow unqualified praise on the ecclesiastical system of any class of Dissenters . In most , or all , there are monstrous evils ; but the patrons of their colleges will not , at any rate , waste their resources upon hopeless subjects . They are in earnest for the support and dissemination of their religion ; the Church is not , or it would adopt similar means .
The next step which Dissenters take in pursuance of this object , is to adapt the education of their preachers to their future occupation . Not so the Church . If by some rare good luck the right man be sent to the university , it is ten to one but he is spoiled there . As his vocation will include the delivery of a public oration or address once , or perhaps twice a week , it might be
expected that some care would be taken to form the orator . There is an art or knack in addressing an auditory , which is seldom well acquired unless it be early in life . In no department is this art so essential , as in that of the clergyman . He has no new thing to tell his hearers , his task is to render interesting and impressive that which all the world knows beforehand . There is none of the
excitement which is occasioned by the prospect of influencing some immediate event , and which acts upon him like the result ot an election on the speaker from the hustings , the verdict of a jury on the pleader in a trial , or the numbers of a division on a member of parliament . He has none of that ample supply of appropriate material for the occasion , which is furnished in those cases by the principles of the candidates , the lawyer's brief , and the political question at issue . Nor does he address an auditory pre-
Untitled Article
792 Churchcraft .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1833, page 792, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2626/page/60/
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