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Untitled Article
then we wonder at the boldness which can commit any man to the declaration . The facts , my lord , are all on one side . In London and its adjacent boroughs we have 459 places of worship : of these , though London is the strong-hold of churches , 265 are dissenting and only 194 are established places . Dissent has spread over the country about 8000 chapels , besides school-houses and preaching-rooms ; it has provided for the respectable education [ and sustenance of a ministry , commensurate with this demand ; while it has done this , it has been made to contribute
its proportion towards the support of an endowed Church ; and yet it has , as if refreshed by its exertions , greatly surpassed that Church in its contributions of service and money to those great efforts of Christian benevolence which are not of a sectarian but of a general character . But it is urged , that the voluntary principle will not work uniformly ; that though it should provide for the large towns , it could riot carry the means of religion into our small villages and agricultural districts . There
is something plausible in this argument , and it rests on many conscientious minds as a real difficulty . A simple question or two is sufficient , however , to rectify the judgment . If by preference , any parts of our country were selected as poor and thinly populated , they would be Corn-Wall and Wales . Who has carried religion over these unpromising
districts , —the endowed or the dissenting teacher ? One more question : There are in England and Wales 3000 stations at which the curates who serve them have less than 100 Z . a year ; these are certainly the smallest and poorest in the country ; could the voluntary principle do less for them ? is it not certain , if they deserved to hold their stations at all , that it would do much more for them V—pp . 51 , 52 .
Example of America . * One of its small and new towns , for instance , as an ordinary sample , contains 6 , 000 persons ; it has five churches ; and half the population attends them . New York has 200 , 000 inhabitants ; it has 101 churches ; this will give , at an average attendance of 500 each , a fourth of the population as church-going , and that of London by the same estimate would give only one-seventh . It has 15 , 000 churches raised amongst a population of 12 , 000 , 000 ; and the average attendance cannot be taken at less than one in four , while that of Great Britain cannot be taken
higher than one in five . And what is remarkable is , that it has achieved this with a population doubling itself in fourteen years ; and instead of appealing to the principle of State endowment , as in an emer gency , it has renounced it as inefficient where it did exist . Thus we have a land , under the greatest disadvantage , without any endowment for the purposes
of religious worship , provided with more churches , with a more efficient ministry , and with a better average reward for ministration than we have in our own country , where every advantage has been possessed for ages , and where some three millions a-year are given to uphold an establishment . '—pp . 54 , 55 .
The Dissenters deny , and justly , that a majority has any moral rig ht to support its own religion 3 by taxing the minority . Moreover , the assumption so often made that the Church is in a majority , is investigated . If nguies are demanded on this subject they are at hand ; and they b ) wU be supplied by the Churchman rather than the Dissenter , The
Untitled Article
68 Case of the Dissenters .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1834, page 68, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2629/page/70/
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