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Untitled Article
own observation may be relied upon , contribute their full proportion to the well-known demonstration that Oxford is the most learned place in the world , because every man takes some learning there , while very few bring- any away . And although the sarcastic remarks on learning to pray extempore have useful truth in them , yet here again the evil is positive and not comparative . There may be not less levity in the liturgy , than prepo 3 terousness in
personal prayer . No dissenting student ever gabbled more grossly than the velocipede dignitary , who declared ,, that in reciting the Creed he could g ive any man as far as ' Pontius Pilate , ' and catch him b y the time he got to ' Catholic Church . ' O , there is much profanity in all priestcraft ! The schools of the prophets are all too much addicted to making profits ; and though the raw youth sometimes complains that the Greek grammar is not spiritual , the finished priest makes the Bible carnal to balance the account ^ and serves God and Mammon .
Clever and caustic , rich and racy , are the author ' s portraits— . of the leaders of the aristocratic and democratic party in a town congregation , the drysalter who lived in the neighbourhood of Portman-square , and the hardware men of Houndsditch ; the lady who subscribed ten guineas a year , and became thereby a
female head of the Church , the Queen Elizabeth of the Conventicle ; the members of his country congregation , in which every member was the unruly one ; the corn factor ' s wife and the grocer ' s widow , with their untraceable quarrel , which had begun in a hidden source , like the Nile , and flowed on to the ocean of
eternity ; the popular minister , who put one idea into many words , and so made his ideas go a great way ; the controversial heretic , the squabbling separatists , the declining Presbyterians : all these and many more furnish a gallery such as has seldom been opened for public inspection , and are sketched with a hand as graphic as the subjects are grotesque . The orthodox Dissenters will complain that the author has
misrepresented their morals ; and the heretics that he has falsified their faith . This is a laudable jealousy in both parties . We must say , however , that the memorials of martyrs are seldom so amusing as his account of the Unitarian mission , with the consecration and desecration of the corn loft . It is a monitory specimen of the perversity that thinks to prevail over prejudice by pragmatiealnes . s , courts popularity by criticism , destroys doctrines by articles and particles , and dreams of a power in
mere negations , to reach the heart , to correct the character , and elevate the life . The party may learn wholesome truth from this fiction . They might have done something towards rationalizing religion , but if they will turn into the road , and imbibe the spirit of sectarianism , they must be , amongst sects , the most feeble , distracted , and contemptible . The great event in the dissenting minister ' s autobiography , is
Untitled Article
872 The Autobiography of a Dissenting Minister .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1834, page 872, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2640/page/54/
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