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
There are not many persons in this secret, perhaps, not even you, the
first Minister of the country; so it will be deemed too abstruse and
mystical on which to find a warrant for legislation or change of law:
but I strenuously maintain, that such was the origin of the Christian
Church, and such is now its generally lost meaning. The proof of the
solar part of the allegory is not so much to my present purpose as
the proof of the general drama of human morals being the basis of the
present mystery of the Christian Church.
To stay a growing difficulty, we must go to the root:--it will grow
again, if we do not go to the root. It will be so with the present
Church, and all attempts to reform it.
In plainer language, then, I will describe the existing Church, as
having, in its ceremonies and business, the mystery of the Christian
Religion, without its revelation; that all the defects and all the
grounds of dissent from it are the absence of the revelation, or want of
knowing the meaning of the mystery. Whatever are called its doctrines,
are all mysterious; its discipline is equally mysterious, and by its
present ministers, unaccountable. Dissenters have dissented without
being able to assign a reason for their dissent, and have set up for
themselves something equally mysterious and unaccountable; and so the
whole principle and practice of Religion in the country is in confusion
and conflict; and no measure can reconcile the dissentients, short
of developing the first principles of the Church and the Christian
Religion, the one language, the one course of reason, the one ground of
human welfare, the one system of morals, which is now buried in a
Babel of confused tongues, doctrines, idol-houses, and superstitious
ceremonies.
The ground, then, on which I proceed, is, that TO REFORM THE CHURCH, THE
DISSENTERS MUST BE ANNIHILATED.
Not annihilated by slaughter or physical force; but by superior
knowledge, and consequent superior teaching, by openness, by honesty, by
throwing off the mask of hypocrisy, and leaving the Church of Christ to
be no longer a theatre of dramatic ceremony in mystery, with parts and
actors as ignorant as automata of their subject, and who not knowing,
can value it not, beyond the salaries they receive for its performance
in unrevealed mystery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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