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Untitled Article
being trumpeted on the high ways . Let me not be misunderstood as ridiculing scripture . I do ridicule the professors of the Christian religion ,, who , in their high places , are great sticklers for the church . With these examples to second him ,, the Rev . Charles B . Tayler may advise the mechanic with some hope of success . The
spirit of Christianity is more generally diffused through people of the mechanics' class , than it will be found to be in the upper classes . Verily , then will the mechanic be regenerated . Remedies such as the rev . gentleman proposes have been advocated for centuries and centuries ; and wh y are they of no effect ? because the precept which is set forth , and talked ^ and babbled , is scoffed by the
practice of the rulers and teachers themselves . In sweating under toil for his scanty portion of life ' s necessaries , think you that the mechanic can be without a revulsion of feeling ., wherr , as pure and holy precepts are spoken to him ,, or rise up in his memory , he reflects on the daily and hourly habitual mockery by practice and example which his spiritual guides and authorized advisers exhibit even at the instant of their exhortation , and while they
ostentatiously profess those laws and instructions as the rules and graces of their own lives ? Then rattles in his ears the bishop ' s carriage , and the clanking hoofs of his richly caparisoned and well-fed steeds ; and think you not he says to himself , There is one who preaches to me of his master , the lowly Jesus—whose instructions and warnings against pomp and riches do so edify him—he shuns wealth as the root of all evil , and covets not the fatted ox in the stall . He has
sold all his goods to tollovv the Lord / Not he—he has sold the Lord to look after worldly wealth and worldly dignities . Blame not that man , or mechanic , if he sometimes think the priests of religion , whatever their tongues may have spoken , have said to him in their hearts * Be quiet , goose , lie still , and be plucked . ' On them the onus of his irreligion rests . Let your men and women in the
high places show that they are Christians indeed , and the mechanic will amend his life , ( his heart is better than the Rev . Charles B . Tayler thinks it is . ) Of this ' Christianity indeed , ' there is little hope in that quarter , none from this writer ' s ' social evils and their remedies */ and if only such advisers spring up , that little hope will be thrown into greater distance . Let him cure the
scoffing in the high born and wealthy , who scoff their religion and their God when they are ' condescending to the poor , and , as they call them , low born : then the impurity of the mechanic will be washed away with very little trouble . But , no , this will not be done : therefore let the mechanic take every means of improving and
bettering himself , by an accumulation of knowledge , which leads him to a sense of his rights , and teaches him a judicious mode of securing those rights , and rightly using them when he has obtained them . Then may he be led silentl y and securely into doing of * God ' s will on earth as it is done in heaven . ' Such is the current course of those rights which the mechanic of England
Untitled Article
740 Social Evils and their Remedy .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1833, page 740, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2626/page/8/
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