Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
worse than the Established Churches. And thus the balance of
advantage seems to rest with the Established Churches; and they seem
to have apprehended and applied Christ's words, if not with perfect
adequacy, at least less inadequately than the Nonconformists.
Might it not, then, be urged with great force that the way to do
good, in presence of this operation for uprooting the Church
establishment in Ireland by the power of the Nonconformists'
antipathy to publicly establishing or endowing religious worship, is
not by lending a hand straight away to the operation, and
Hebraising,--that is, in this case, taking an uncritical
interpretation of certain Bible words as our absolute rule of
conduct,--with the Nonconformists. If may be very well for born
[211] Hebraisers, like Mr. Spurgeon, to Hebraise; but for Liberal
statesmen to Hebraise is surely unsafe, and to see poor old Liberal
hacks Hebraising, whose real self belongs to a kind of negative
Hellenism,--a state of moral indifferency without intellectual
ardour,--is even painful. And when, by our Hebraising, we neither do
what the better mind of statesmen prompted them to do, nor win the
affections of the people we want to conciliate, nor yet reduce the
opposition of our adversaries but rather heighten it, surely it may
be not unreasonable to Hellenise a little, to let our thought and
consciousness play freely about our proposed operation and its
motives, dissolve these motives if they are unsound, which certainly
they have some appearance, at any rate, of being, and create in their
stead, if they are, a set of sounder and more persuasive motives
conducting to a more solid operation. May not the man who promotes
this be giving the best help towards finding some lasting truth to
minister to the diseased spirit of his time, and does he really
deserve that the believers in action should grow impatient with him?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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