Church Reform: The Only Means to That End, Stated in a Letter to Sir Robert Peel, Bart., First Lord of the TreasuryCarlile, Richard
Religion
Church Reform: The Only Means to That End, Stated in a Letter to Sir Robert Peel, Bart., First Lord of the Treasury
Carlile, Richard
Bible -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Church and state -- Church of England; Rationalism
The one in man is worshipped or cultivated by attention to health; the
other by attention to mental improvement or increased acquisition of
knowledge. Speaking of God, as the aggregate and source of physical
and moral spirit, of which man is a part or unit, we experience that we
cannot alter our physical construction, or physical spirit, other than
by attention to rules of health in the law of nature; but we can, by
study and labour, greatly alter the state of mind or moral spirit. It
is here we draw from God as from a fountain; and this asking, seeking,
drawing from God, constitutes the whole principle of right prayer and
worship, and the structure of the true Christian Church; other than
which, I declare, is worship of the Devil and not of God. And I do not
shrink from saying, that, as revelation is light and knowledge of God,
and mystery is darkness and presence of the Devil, there has not through
the last fifteen hundred years, the dark ages, throughout Europe, been
carried on any other kind of worship than Devil-worship, and evil has
been the fruit thereof. It was under this knowledge that I was moved to
exhibit the effigy of the Devil arm in arm with the Bishop, in the
front of my house and in several prints, for which I am now suffering
imprisonment, like all other martyrs to truth, punished for acting upon
my knowledge. My purpose was good, to open the eyes of my neighbours and
passers by. It might have inconvenienced some of them; but such is the
effect of every newly-published truth in eradication of error: your
Reform of the Church, be it what it may, will inconvenience the Bishops
and some of the Clergy. There would be no Devil, if there were not
pleasure in Hell as well as in Heaven; as pardon can be had by asking
for it. If all evil were naturally punished, we should not want penal
laws.
As true worship is a getting of a knowledge of God, so it follows, that
the Ministry of the Church should consist of a teaching that knowledge,
which is not now the case; for nothing as knowledge is in the Church
taught.
There can be nothing more clear in mathematical demonstration, than
that, as God is a Spirit, of which man may partake, the participation
must increase with that only which can increase in man--the amount of
his knowledge. The whole declaration of the Christian Creed, read by the
spirit, is, that God is the Spirit of Knowledge, the thing known, the
principle of omniscience; and that man approaches and lives with God, as
his mind expands in the accumulation of knowledge. A Bishop may write
or preach spiritually or metaphysically by the year, and he can make no
more of the word God, of his Church, or of himself, than I have made.
The subject now wants a radical reform in the human mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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