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Untitled Article
use it , that of dismission . The possession of the right has considerable efficacy in preventing occasions for its exercise . In the Establishment it costs a bishop several hundred pounds to cashier even a grossly immoral clergymen . This is a pretty satisfactory pledge of impunity to the offender . The * devil ' s chaplain' has not forfeited his surplice by the acceptance of that appointment .
No Church intending to send forth a succession of useful teachers would ever make such a requisition as that of previous subscription to a long , complicated , mysterious , and continually disputed creed . The practice evidently tends to put down freedom of speech ^ independence of thought , impartiality of research , improvement , and sincerity . The future teacher of morality
begins his preparation by repeating the bad lesson of equivocation and mental reservation ; he is stripped of qualities essential to his aptitude for his work ; he enters the course of inquiry with thirty-nine articles strapped to his back , and tells others to ' lay aside every weight . ' It is not possible that the clergy should , at the time and ever after , believe all that they swear to . From
the nature and number of the propositions contained in the formulary which they subscribe , we may be sure that they do not ; the inference is warranted by facts ; in various ways many give evidence , either direct or incidental , of their diversity of opinion ; many more give very sufficient evidence of their having no opinion at all about the matter ; they are guiltless of all heresies , save the
worst , that of choosing a faith which they have never investigated for the sake of the worldly advantages thereunto appended . The people , at least the more observant and intelligent portion of them , cannot and do not believe in the mental integrity of their admonishers : no man worthy of being the intellectual leader of
other men can submit to this vassalage ; he would feel himself degraded and unnerved ; he would as soon go into Parliament under a solemn obligation , in spite of all he may hear , see , or think , to support all his life some three or four hundred political propositions . No ' scheme of instruction' can ever avail with such a yoke on the neck of its teachers .
There is no encouragement in the Church for a man to do his duty ; servility to a noble patron may wriggle its way through the dirt to a fat recompense ; relationship to a bishop is a good title ; to a premier still better ; it is piety , learning , eloquence , and diligence , all in one . A well-timed pamphlet on a ticklish question may turn to good account with the administration . * The ox knoweth his stall . ' Now and then , a man who has nothing but learning , and inoffensive habits withal , gets promotion for the look of the thing ; but the really earnest and active man , who
sets about doing good amongst the poor and ignorant with all his might , may spend his life in a curacy of sixty pounds a-year . Who supposes that if he were to follow the hounds instead of visiting the sick , his chance of preferment would be one jot
Untitled Article
Churchcraft . 795
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1833, page 795, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2626/page/63/
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