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Untitled Article
diminished ? He may have his reward in heaven , but the Church neither gives him that , nor can take it away . We do not advert at all , on the present occasion , to the infringements by a Church Establishment on the rights of conscience ; to its heavy and vexatious pressure on the resources of the
community ; to its abominable prostitution to the political and selfish views of the aristocracy ; to the hostile attitude continually assumed by it towards mental light and political liberty ; of these we shall probably take our time to say something , while what has now been urged may , we think , suffice to show that taking the Church upon the ground of its own choice , looking at
it simply and solely as a professed means of religious instruction , it is not honestly constituted for the realization of that profession . The religious instruction of the public is not the aim and tendency of its arrangements ; from first to last , they bear in a different direction ; instead of an essential good , with incidental evils , the evil is in its essence , and the good an accident .
The particular instance of insincerity which Mr . Potter ( for we know not why we should not name the author of a succession of enlightened and beneficent publications ) more particularly exposes , is that of retaining in the authorized version of the New Testament the celebrated text of the three heavenly witnesses , 3 John , ch . 5 , v . 7 , which biblical critics have long known to be a
forgery , and which was shown to be so ,, before its rejection from the text of Griesbach , by the demonstrative Letters of Porson to Archdeacon Travis . We quote his remarks at length , partly oti account of the touching delineation which they contain of a superior mind , as was that of Porson , sacrificed to the demoralizing system which had yoked him to its car .
c ask the learned and politic friend of Porson , the Bishop of London , who in his sermons defends the Athanasian Creed as declaratory ( forsooth !) and not judicial , and who assures his readers that
44 disrepute into which this formula has been brought is to nothing more owing than to its habitual omission hy many of the parochial clergy ; " we ask the prelate who insisted upon " this formula" being duly read in all the churches in his diocess , in which it had been 44 omitted by the parochial clergy , " whether the bishops , by enforcing
or even by sanctioning the reading of the Creed of St . Athanasius and the text of the three Heavenly Witnesses in the church , have not proved themselves inefficient guardians of truth , and false shepherds of the flock ? We have much sympathy with men who , to use an expression of Paley , are too poor to keep a coriscience , and have no heart to urge on them that man does not live by bread only . But we
have small sympathy with those who are not rick enough to keep a conscience themselves , nor to allow others to keep a conscience . When the Bishop of London brings forward that promised bill by which he proposes to propitiate the times ; the bill which is to relieve thoughtless collegians and reckless smugglers from what is to them the mere formula of an oath , we trust he will give a thought to the
Untitled Article
796 Churchcraft .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1833, page 796, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2626/page/64/
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