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poor may be led ; and by contrast , how the Church does not lead them . Here again is failure . In the aristocracy there is no competition . For the very superior religion and morality to be found in that quarter , the Church may take credit . The remarkable piety of the peerage shall be posted to its account . There is a third order in the state yet to be mentioned . For as the human
race has been divided into men , women , and fools , so may the nation be distributed into the rich , the poor , and the thinkers . For the last class an Establishment has been deemed especially necessary , inasmuch as it provides ample means and ample rewards for the production of learned books by learned men to put down the heresy and infidelity which is reckoned the besetting sin of the aforesaid thinkers . And hew does this scheme turn out ?
Whose works are still the storehouse for replies to Deistical objections ? Those of Leland , the Irish Presbyterian . Whose the most ample and authentic collection of the external testimonies to the Christian Scriptures ? That of Lardner , the English Presbyterian . Whose the most impressive statements of the internal evidences ? Those of Chalmers , the Scotch Presbyterian , and of Channing , the American Unitarian . The standard critical work
on the New Testament is that of Michaelis the German . We give Bishop Marsh credit for its translation . Even for the best modern defences of its great doctrines of the Godhead of Christ and the atonement , the English Church has to go out of its own boundaries ; and if the one be furnished by Magee , the Irish Bishop , for the other it is indebted to Dr . Pye Smith , an English
Independent . This is only a specimen of the case which might be made out against the Church of many endowments and high pretensions . Many wise and good men , no doubt , have been educated in its seminaries , and have adorned its communion . Many and many thousands of different classes of the people have , no doubt , in each successive generation , found strength and consolation in its devotional offices . We have no desire to detract one atom from the
amount of its good deeds and influences . But whatever that amount , it cannot destroy the facts just alleged , and which facts constitute failure in an institution claiming to be national . Besides failing of the good , for the production of which it is avowedly established , the Church is in many ways the cause of public evils .
It has always strenuously supported despotic principles and measures . Every tyrannical monarch and tyrannical minister has had its hosts at his back to support his warfare upon the liberties of his country . The solitary exception is only an apparent one . The Church would have supported James the Second , but for the conviction that James the Second would not have supported the Church . There was no love of liberty , either civil or religious , in the part it took in the Revolution of 1688 . Loud was the boast , not long before , of its singularity in the glorious work of preaching
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Church Reform . 807
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3 M 2
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1833, page 807, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2628/page/3/
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