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Untitled Article
* Yet has Porson left behind him a work of power to overthrow the unreasonahle and uncharitable interpolations which those who shore his locks and put out his eyes still force as genuine and reasonable and charitable , on ministers and on people . The spirit of Porson is abroad , not in his learned work , \ rhich two-thirds of the church
striving doubtless to keep a conscience void of offence , have never read , but in the reason and in the feelings of the people . This is the Samson whose eyes they have put out , and bound him in . fetters of brass . This is the Samson of whom they still think to make sport , but whose hair has grown since he was shaven . This is the Samson who will be
led by the lad , a yet young but rapidly growing knowledge , to the pillars whereupon the house standeth , the pillars of bigotry and fanaticism which support the house of falsehood . This is the Samson who will bow himself with all his might , and the whole building of falsehood will fall on the interested persons within , and with the foolish persons without , but especially on the lords of the Philistines .
* When the people turn their attention more and more to a national debt of eight hundred millions , and feel that even the yearly interest of this enormous debt presses on industry with an overwhelming weight , they will expect to he lightened of all burdens which are at once useless and onerous . The hierarchy of the church , archbishops and bishops , deans and chapters , are too costly besoms to be kept in these days of hard labour and small remuneration , for little more than
the idle purpose [ of sweeping empty cathedrals . Even the most orthodox , who insist that genuine ordination depends on spiritual influence having been handed down through an unbroken series of bishops from the times of the apostles , may still agree that two archbishops may be sufficient for the service of ordination , and will consent to get rid of the rest of an expensive hierarchy , which if it had the
will to labour has no field for exertions which may deserve such remuneration from an impoverished people . " * If indeed it should be thought that the political services of the fifteen English and three Irish prelates who sanctioned the enforcing of tithes and the building of parsonages in parishes where there is no cure , are worth retaining , let the ecclesiastical sinecurists be removed , but let the ecclesiastical
politicians be rewarded according to their services . If these services be estimated according to their manifest effects , the impossibility of getting rid of rebellion in Ireland so long as these spiritual lords are attended to , and the necessity of keeping up a standing array in
Engterests are not the Juste milieu , insist on beginning with first principles ? M . Cousin is philosophically as well as practically right in founding national education on pious feeling and religious conviction . But if he does not honestly and boldly clear his foundations of falsehood and contempt , he has read his Plato to very little effect , or rather he has learnt from Plato to believe in the possibility of deceiving the people for their good . It is remarkable that Plato practises pious frauds frequently , in direct opposition to gome of his own clearly developed principles .
* It is a fatal mistake respecting the interest * of the working clergy to identify them with the claims , of an useless hierarchy . Let the sincerity of the clergy be set free from the surveillance , and their energies released from the repression to which their spiritual superiors subject them , and the Church will become at once the national temple and the national school , and in both ways dear to the people . At present the working clergy is wei g hed down by the imputation of uselessnuss , mischievouaness , and costliness , which axe fastened upon it by its connexion with an unwieldy hierarchy .
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79 & Churchcraft .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1833, page 798, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2626/page/66/
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