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Untitled Article
meetings of their forefathers during the Five-mile Act , We have no national religious festival , for th ^ s plain reason , that whatever may be canted about the Church , we have no national religion . We never had ; or , at least , we never have had since the Reformation . Episcopacy has never been more than a party . As it advanced upon Popery , Puritanism advanced upon it , in public
opinion and feeling . We keep Christmas indeed , but simply as a holiday , and with little of either memory or meaning . And the same may be said of Easter and Whitsuntide , There is an extra sermon in the meeting-house on ' thfe day called Christmas * day / with a protest perhaps against ecclesiastical authority ; and all that makes it a holy-tide at church is the holly that is tied to
the pillars . Our Sundays are divided between the dreariness of fanatical Sabbatarianism and the disorders of unthinking debauchery . In old times the sun used to dance on the morning of Easter Sunday ; he will never dance again on a Sunday morning till he looks down upon doings which have in them more of cheerfulness , rationality , and conduciveness to common instruction
and enjoyment . We give it up then for the present . But when a broad and comprehensive right of suffrage , without a property qualification for the candidate , shall have given that political existence to the working classes which was conferred by the Reform Bill upon the middle classes , who are not one jot better qualified : when , by ballot-voting for a time , the suffrage shall have become an
unmolested and unquestioned individual right in its exercise : when the great social duty shall be discharged of providing and requiring that every child shalL be trained for his functions as a member of society : when , instead of a brutalizing exclusion from artistical enjoyment , ( architectural , pictorial , theatrical , and all other forms in which the sense of beauty , grandeur , harmony , can be
presented to the soul , ) it shall be one ot the primary objects of political institution to diffuse as widely as possible this refining species of delight : when philosophy , natural and moral , instead of being obstructed by taxation , by college monopoly , and by the thousand prejudices which must give way as the antique and feudal framework of society breaks down and is remodelled , shall
have fair play , in theory and practice , with the mind , manners , and condition of the great mass of the people : then will there be the taste , as there probably will have been the stimulus , for such celebrations as cannot now be realized . Let us wait jpatiently . Nil desperandum . Nature keeps up her holidays for aft sentient beings ; her May-days and her harvest-tides . And eventually nations must follow nature .
Untitled Article
National Anniversaries , 755
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1834, page 755, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2639/page/7/
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