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Untitled Article
the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance . Throughout the oppression , taxation , and carnage of the ministry of William Pitt the clergy harnessed themselves to his car , and dragged him along triumphantly . Every body knows that they are still the same . The Reform Act put the final seal upon their character , and their doom . The Church keeps up a spirit of intolerant sectarianism . It is itself an exclusive and anathematizing sect . It sets the example of threatening damnation for differences of opinion . The Puritans
were worried by the most arbitrary and useless requisitions of conformity . The Act of Uniformity was a notable instance of sectarian despotism . Then came the Corporation and Test Acts , and a series of unrelenting persecutions . The sectarianism of Dissenters is , to a considerable extent , only a reaction of the established sectarianism . The manoeuverings of the great brigade of bigotry occasion the corresponding movements of the hostile
regiments ; and so the country is distracted with the conflicts of sects . Although only a portion of the tithe falls upon the public , and that portion might be removed to the right shoulders by a commutation , yet the total amount of taxation , direct and indirect , on behalf of the Church , makes itself pretty well felt amid the
pressure of our fiscal burdens . Libraries , institutes , schools , almost every device for enlightening the people , has either had to encounter the direct hostility of the clergy , ( a * a body ) or been crippled and perverted by their insidious friendship . The Church and the aristocracy play into one another ' s hands . The third in the game is sure to be pigeoned . The mutual advantages of an alliance between the ecclesiastical monopoly and
the tax-levying influence are very obvious . The evil has not been confined to the pocket ; it has been over the mind . There has been a diligent fostering of useful prejudices . Useful to whom ? The third in the game is finding that out . This failure and these evils are not accidental ; they are owing to inherent defects in the constitution of the Established Church . Almost all the plans of Church reform which we have seen are
very inefficient , because they do not go to the root of the evil ; they do not touch the sectarian character of the Church , its sinister interest as a close corporation , its connexion with the aristocracy as distinguished from the community , and its essential inadequacy , as a system of instruction , to meet the wants of the
present age . So long as these remain , there can be nothing deserving the name of reform ; nothing from which the nation can derive material benefit , although it may perhaps sustain injury . Enforcing residence more strictly , so that , instead of fewer than half the clergy living in their parishes , two-thirds perhaps might do so ; taking a few thousands per annum from the episcopal
Untitled Article
808 Church Reform .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1833, page 808, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2628/page/4/
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