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Untitled Article
advantage in the promotion of the real objects of a national church , —pious feelings , religious obligations , sound knowledge , and right conduct . That your petitioner cannot consent to the insincerity and fraud
of professing what he does not believe ; and that he conceiTes the state has no right to force him to this under penalty of losing his station in society and his means of life ; and that if he were to submit to that injustice , he should sacrifice a moral satisfaction and an intellectual power which might be employed with good effect in promoting the real objects of a national church .
That your petitioner begs to submit , that it is no * a national church , but a sectarian creed , which , by depriving him of useful employment and daily bread , forces him into opposition to the government of the country , in order to obtain the repeal of false principles and unjust practices , which bear hard upon his rights and interests , and still more hardly on sincerity and justice .
That your petitioner has clung , in defiance of many evidences , to the hope of right measures , respecting the union of church and state , being adopted by a Whig government , is proved by the fact that he has declined to attend meetings and to sign petitions for a separation of church and state .
That your petitioner adduces this fact as a proof that he has some feeling for the daily bread and the deliverance from ev 3 of the members of an established church ; he cannot call it a national church , which hitherto has proved that it cares little for the sincerity of the individual minister , little for justice to bodies of pkxxs and relig ious men , little for the peace and welfare of the community . These blessings , together with an advance in truth ,
alreadybecome so necessary for the repression of anarchy and the srjpport of government , the established church is willing to sacrifice foe a short lease of its spiritual and temporal monopoly . It is- abundantly evident that on a determination to employ national means for national objects , depends the union or disunion , not only of Catholics , and Churchmen , and Dissentersr but of the higher , the middle , and the lower orders .
That your petitioner deeply regretted to see one great opportunity lost by the p resent Ministry of placing the state in its true position with the church , namel y * at the time of the dLsturbactcvs in Ireland , to suppress which the Coercion Bill was pissed . The government might then have boldly declared its intention to defend the revenues of the church , as a fund lor the education and
civilisation of Ireland , instead of sacrificing an iusuicBciettt jx * rtkwb o £ them . Protestants and Catholics . Catholics and Ptovtestatits * mw ^ itt have been called to unite in this great objtfet > ujtwier prouiise that the doers of the work should * under s *> uie arrangenHNmiv be ireswarded without tear or favour . It was a glorious ojjpcwtiiwaitjjr for statesmen to have told churchmen a truth they OMgfafc to > heaur . ** lW may become good servants * and therein we will save tou foaoi x < w
Untitled Article
for Ecclesiastical Reform . 501
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1834, page 501, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2635/page/41/
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