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
Any idea of keeping up a Law Established Church with public property,
surrounded by Dissenting Churches, without a public property, can enter
the head of no man who understands the subject. There can be no peace
or final settlement under such an arrangement. The effect to be
accomplished is, not to break up the Church Property; but to break up
the Dissenters from the Church. This will startle the present state of
mind and feeling. I propose no abridgement of equal liberty. Is not this
the grand _desideratum?_ Can it be accomplished?--I think it can, and so
proceed to unfold the two-fold consideration.
First.--What is now the Church? What are its defects? What the cause of
that dissent which has made a revision necessary?
This, in reality, is but one question, with a three-fold expression.
The Church is now the Theatre of the Drama of the Books of Common
Prayer, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Old and New Testament; to
which is generally added a sermonic epilogue or exhortation, commonly
called a Sermon.
Be not offended at my use of the word _Theatre_ here: no other
would substitute. Its root is the Greek [------], God, and signified
originally, the house, place or stage, where the Drama of Theism or
attributes of Deity were exhibited. The word is now much distorted
from its root, in being made to describe the place of modern dramatic
performances.
Nor must the word _Drama_ be objected to; because the ceremony of the
Church was originally so constructed, so meant, and so practised, as I
will prove in the course of this letter.
Even the word _Tragedy_ has its root in the Greek word [------], a goat,
and signifies, in the dramatic exhibition of Theism, the death of the
year, under the form of a personification, in the twelfth or zodiacal
month of the goat. So that the death sorrowed for and lamented, was,
dramatically, the apparent death of the sun, the death of the year, in
the sign or month of the goat; and on St. Thomas's day, as we read in
the Prophet Ezekiel, chap. viii. v. 14--"_and behold there sat women
weeping for Tammuz;_" and v. 16--"_about five and twenty men, with their
backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east;
and they worshipped the sun toward the east_," which is no other than
a representation of the performance of the tragedy, in which the
performers had lost the moral of the Lord's Temple: precisely the
present state and condition of the Church. All ancient mythology is
in harmony with this conclusion; and the Christian tragedy is only a
continued version, uniting the general drama of human morals with the
annual tragedy of solar physics, and forming a two-fold or two-keyed
allegory or mystery, physical and moral, as it was known even in the
Celtic or Druid Church. Christianity was never new, or young, in this
country, by existing records.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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