Part 2 (1/2)

and claimed to be cultivated by the people, who in every land were suffering the maladies which it had the properties to heal But, while by the greater part of mankind it was not accounted worth admission to a place on their blasted, desolated soil, thethose who pretended to esteeift of the divine beneficence, is recorded in eternal reproach of the Christian nations

As the hostility of heathenision, became evidently hopeless, in the nations within the Roe of the policy of evil; and alltheeneral conspiracy into treacherous conjunction with Christianity, retaining their own quality under the sanction of its na it to surrender al distinctive of it but that dishonored naross darkness covering the people” There were indeed in existence the inspired oracles, and these could not be essentially falsified But there was no lack of expedients and pre-texts for keeping theht be done under a pretence that reverence for their sanctity required they should be secluded as within the recesses of a tees; a pretence excellently contrived, since it was its own security against exposure, the people being thus kept unaware that the sacred writings the thee The deceivers were not worse off for the other facilities In the progress of translation, the holy Scriptures could be intercepted and stopped short in a language but little less unintelligible than the original ones to the bulk of the people, in order that this ”profane vulgar” ht never hear the very words of God, but only such report as it should please certain ive of what he had said; norant to cite it in even a falsified ie, in the usage of social converse, there was a grand security against thee of letters, that the Bible, if such a rare thing ever could happen to fall into any of their hands, would be no lyphics When to this was added, the great cost of a copy of so large a book before the invention of printing, it remained perhaps just worth while, (and it would be a ,) to make it, in the ious invasion of sacerdotal privilege, to look into a Bible If it ht see list already denounced by the divine law, a so the principles of obligation with respect to them all

In this latency of the sacred authorities, withdrawn fro, there were retained still ion They remained, but they re spirit of that religion was leaving them void of their import and solemnity, and so rendered applicable to purposes of deception and inal contents , be clandestinely replaced by the nant preparations And as crafty and wicked men had a direct interest in this substitution, the pernicious operation went on incessantly; and with an ability, and to an extent to evince that the utenius, when it is iniquity that sets it on fire How prolific was the invention of the falsehoods and absurdities of notion, and of the vanities and corruptions of practice, which it was devised to nate and sanction! while it was also ed, with no less sedulity and success, that the inventors and propagators should be held in submissive reverence by the community, as the oracular depositaries of truth That coh of any other kind, to create a resisting and defensive power against this iion A sound exercise of reason on subjects out of that province, a htly so called, ht have produced, in the persons of superior native capacity, somewhat of a competency and a disposition to question, to examine, to call for evidence, and to detect some of the fallacies inorance, the general mind was on all sides pressed and borne down to its fate All reaction ceased; and the people were reduced to exist in one huge, unintelligent, monotonous substance, united by the interfusion of a vile superstition, which perhactuated to all the purposes of cheats, and tyrants,--a proper subject for the dominion of ”our Lord God the Pope,” as he was soht have been deno ofthe form of men and the name of Christians

Reflect that all this took place under the nohtest economy of instruction from heaven Reflect that it was in nations where even the sovereign authority professed hoion of Christ, and adopted and enforced it as a grand national institution, that the popular mass was thus reduced to a material fit for all the bad uses to which priestcraft could wish to put the souls and bodies of its slaves And then consider what _should_ have been the condition of this great aggregate, wherever Christianity was acknowledged by all as the true religion The people _should_ have consisted of so ree, the independent, beneficial use of his _mind_; all of the apprized of their responsibility to their Creator, for the exercise of their reason on the matters of belief and choice; all of the furnished with the rudi within their reach, in their own language, the Scriptures of divine truth, some by immediate possession, the rest by means of faithful readers, while the book existed only in manuscript; all of them after it came to be printed

Can any doubt arise, whether there were in the Christian states resources competent, if so applied, to secure to all the people an elementary instruction, and the possession of the printed Bible? Resources competent!

All nations, sufficiently raised above barbarisn and pernicious to their welfare, an infinitely greater amount of means than would have sufficed, after due provision for comfortable physical subsistence, to afford a moderate share of instruction to all the people And in those popish ages, that expenditure alone which went to ecclesiastical use would have been far more than adequate to this beneficent purpose Think of the boundless cost for supporting thethe rapacity of the hierarchy, froh all the orders branded with a consecration under that head to maintain the delusion and share the spoil Recollect the iue, every agent of which was a devourer Recollect the poeneral resources were to be taxed: while the general industry was injured by the interruption of useful employment, and the diversion of the people to such dissipation as their condition qualified and pere in Think also of the incalculable cost of ecclesiastical structures, the temples of idolatry as in truth they were One of the ious and reflective Protestant is, that of passing so the superb arches and columns, of any one of theat this day in our own country If he has sensibility and taste, the raceful union of so enius that quitted the world without leaving even a naical i into the awe of antiquity But he will be recalled--the sculptures, the inscriptions, the sanctuaries enclosed off for the special benefit, after death, of persons who had very different concerns during life fronia of the original character of the place, will help to recall hiht, that these proud piles were in fact raised to celebrate the conquest, and prolong the dominion, of the Power of Darkness over the souls of the people They were as triumphal arches, erected in iven to be the life of men

As he looks round, and looks upwards, on the prodigy of design, and skill, and perseverance, and tributary wealth, hesuccessive ages, frequented this fane in the assured belief, that the idle ceremonies and impious superstitions, which they there performed or witnessed, were a service acceptable to heaven, and to be repaid in blessings to the offerers

He may say to himself, Here, on this very floor, under that elevated and decorated vault, in a ”diht” like this, but with the darkness of the shadow of death in their souls, they prostrated themselves to their saints, or their ”queen of heaven;” nay, to painted ies and toys of wood or wax, to sos of cast-off vest back or pointing forward, dis penances, or to acquire the privilege of sinning with impunity in a certain manner, or for a certain time; and they went out at yonder door in the perfect confidence that the priest had secured, in the one case the suspension, in the other the satisfaction, of the divine law Here they soleht, that, by donatives to the church, they delivered the souls of their departed sinful relations from their state of punishment; and they went out of that door resolved, such as had possessions, to bequeath some portion of them, to operate in the sahly probable case of similar need Here they were convened to listen in reverence to some representative emissary from the Man of Sin, with new dictates of blasphehty: or to witness the trickery of sohten theht have left them of sense, conscience, or property Here, in fine, there was never presented to their understanding, from their childhood to their death, a comprehensive, honest declaration of the laws of duty, and the pure doctrines of salvation To think! that they should have ate of heaven, a place where the Regent of the nether world had so short a way to coents and purchased slaves so short a way to go thither If we could iine a momentary visit from Him who once entered a fabric of sacred denoe, because it was made the resort of a common traffic, hat aspect and voice, hat infliction but the ”rebuke with flames of fire,” would he have entered thisthe name of his sanctuary, where the traffic was in delusions, crimes, and the souls of e, the very ”stone cried out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber answered it,” in denunciation; for a portion of the , in the case of some of these edifices, was obtained as the price of dispensations and pardons [Footnote: That most superb Salisbury Cathedral, for exaht would the earlier history of one of these hty structures, pretendedly consecrated to Christianity, be presented to the reflecting Protestant; and then would recur the idea of its cost, as relative to what that expenditure ht really have done for Christianity and the people It absorbed in the construction, sums sufficient to have supplied, costly as they would have been, even e, (as a priesthood of truly apostolic character would have taken care the Scriptures should speak,) to all the families of a province; and in the revenues appropriated to its h to have provided men to teach all those families to read those Bibles

In all this, and in the whole constitution of the Grand Apostasy, involving innumerable forms of abuse and abomination, to which our object does not require any allusion, how sad a spectacle is held forth of the people destroyed for lack of knowledge If, as one of their plagues, an inferior one in itself, they were plundered as we have seen, of their worldly goods, it was that the spoilWhat was lost to the accommodation of the body, was to be made to contribute to the depravation of the spirit It supplied rand ecclesiasticalthe intellectual despotism of the usurpers of spiritual authority Those authorities enforced on the people, on pain of perdition, an acquiescence in notions and ordinances which, in effect, precluded their direct access to the Al between them and the Divine Majesty a very extensive, coreat measure substituted itself for the real and exclusive mediation of Christ, obscured by its vast creation of intercepting vanities the glory of the Eternal Being, and thus aluished the true worshi+p But how calamitous was such a condition!--to be thus intercepted from direct intercourse with the Supre senti doard, on objects to some of which even the e without a sense of degradation

It was, again, a disastrous thing to be under a directory of practical life framed for the convenience of a corrupt syste, allowed a dispensation froated the essential principle and ground-work of true , that the consolations in sorrow and the view of death should either be too feeble to ani And it was the consues, it was, ereat doctrines of redemption should have been essentially vitiated or formally supplanted, so that multitudes of people were betrayed to rest their final hopes on a ground unauthorized by the Judge of the world In this ht themselves be subjects of the fatal delusion in which they held the community; and well they deserved to be so, in judicial retribution of their wickedness in i on the people, deliberately and on systes which they knew to be false

We have oftenover the , on descriptions of the aspect of a country after a pestilence has left it in desolation, or of a region where the people are perishi+ng by fa to behold, in conte in silence the saardens, fields, and roads; and then to see the countenances of the beings yet languishi+ng in life, looking despair, and i death We have even soination, of a number of hu hold, under an entire privation of sustenance; and presenting each day their irimly sullen, or ates; each succeeding day e of despair; and after awhile appearing each day one fewer, till at last all have sunk Now shall we feel it as a _relief_ to turn in thought, as to a sight of less portentous evil, from the inhabitants of a country, or fro away, to behold the different spectacle of national tribes, or any more limited portion of mankind, on whose _e denied; who are under the process of whatever destruction it is, that spirits can suffer froent nature, especially fro the two to a close comparison, suppose the case, that some of the persons thus dooenuine light and consolations of Christianity, perhaps even had actually been adjudged to this fate, (no extravagant supposition,) for zealously and persistingly endeavoring the restoration of the purity of that religion to the deluded community Let it be supposed that nu conspired to obtain this ad-judgment, frequented the precincts of the fortress, to see their victi It would be quite in the spirit of the popish superstition, that they should believe thely pleased at the sight of the more and more deathlike aspect of the eht be theine theates, and going froht delay the festivity, in order to have the additional luxury of knowing that the tragedy was consummated; as Bishop Gardiner would not dine till the martyrs were burnt--Look at these two contemporary situations, that of the persons with truth and i this slow and painful reduction of their bodies to dissolution,--and that of those hile their bodies fared suh its being surrendered to the curse of a delusion which envenonity: and say which was the more calamitous predica, let us consider whether we have ever been grateful enough to God for the dashi+ng in pieces so long since in this land, of a system which reater part of Christendoments of it are still held in veneration here, and that so tedious a length of ages should be required, to work out a complete mental rescue from the infatuation which possessed our ancestors, let us at the sareat, where this superstition continues to hold the rasp; and verify to ourselves e have to be thankful for, by thinking what reception _our_ ive to an offer of subsistence on their ends, relics, mediation of saints, and corruptions, even to coelic doctrines

It was, however, but very slowly that the people of our land realized the benefits of the Reforressive and its ulti darkness was strikingly manifested by the deep shade which still continued stretched over the nation, in spite of the newly risen lu it to reach the popular mind, and came with the faintness of an obscured and tedious dawn

A long tiht for the evil spirit of popery to be at large and in power, not abashed, as Milton represents the Evil Angel on his being surprised by the guardians of paradise Rather the case was that the vindicator itself of truth and holiness, the true Lucifer, shrunk at the rencounter and defiance of the old possessor of the gloomy dominion The Reformation was not empowered to speak with a voice like that which said, ”Let there be light--and there was light” Consider what, on its avowed national adoption in our land, were its provisions for acting on the community, and ho and partial must have been their efficacy, for either the dissipation of ignorance in general, or the riddance of that worst part of it which had thickened round the Ronant a pestilence as ever walked in darkness There was an alteration of for, in the name of the church and state, the e, in some instances of the persons, but in very many others of the professions merely, of the hierarchy Such were the appoint an innovation of opinions and practices through a nation in which the profoundest ignorance and the most inveterate superstition fortified each other And we ine how fast and how far they would be effective, to convey infor a people whose reason had been just so ion at least, as it had not been totally dormant; and ere too illiterate to be ever the wiser for the volue, in every house, instead of being scarcely in one house in five thousand

Doubtless soe of institutions, by the abolition of so much of the authority of the spiritual despotis the imperative national establishrasp, a number of persons declined and escaped into the new faith, they hardly knehy, it was happy to make the transition on _any_ terms, with however little of the exercise of reason, with however little coround, though a man had corown to a state of mind in which he ceased and refused to worshi+p relics and wafers, to rest his confidence on penance and priestly absolution, and to regard the Virgin and saints as in effect the supreh_ he could not read, and _though_ he could not assign, and had not clearly apprehended, the argue Yes, this would be an iained to the passive slaves of popery but in an exceedingly li course of time after it was supplanted as a national institution It continued to s, and more private habits of the people, a dominion little enfeebled by the necessity of dissimulation in public observances As far as to secure this exterior show of subument that the state had decreed, and would resolutely enforce, a change in religion,--that is to say, till it should be the sovereign pleasure of the next monarch, readily seconded by a majority of the ecclesiastics, just to turn the whole affair round to its foruth on this policy of saving appearances For as there conveyed in it that could strike inward to act upon the fixed tenets of the mind, to destroy there the effect of the earliest and ten thousand subsequent impressions, of inveterate habit and of ancient establishment? Was it to convince and persuade by authority of the overnment in church and state is wiser than the people, and therefore the best judge in every enerally, hat the people firmly believed: it has always, till lately, been the popular faith But then, was the benefit of this obsequious faith to go exclusively to the governovern a conteovernment remembered in the land? Were the people not to hesitate a overnh a long series of ages, had been fools and dupes in reverencing, in their tiovernors?

Theand submissive would feel that this was too overnht, on the substitution of just one individual for another at its head, revoke its own ordinances, and punish those who should contumaciously continue to be ruled by theovernors, at your arbitrary dictate to renounce, as what you are pleased to call idolatries and aboenerations of our ancestors and yours We are to do this on peril of your highest displeasure, and that of God, by whose will you are professing to act; noill ensure us that there may not be, so us have been the most ready of obedience to offer wicked insult to the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church?

This deficiency of the ress of conviction in the mind of the nation, would be slenderly supplied by the authority of the class next to the govern the precedence in actual influence,--that is, the fahout the country For the people well knew, in their respective neighborhoods, that ion, consulting only the policy of a ti conformity; and that some of them hardly attempted or wished to conceal from their inferiors that they preserved their fidelity And then the substituted religion, while it careat dinorant, acknowledged,--proclaimed as one of its chiefconverts fronorance had never been suffered to doubt, till then, that arb could modify, or suspend, or defeat for theive any exemptions or commutations in matters of conscience

When such were the recoion _not_, and when the recommendation which it _had_ was simply, (the royal authority set out of the question,) an offer of evidence to the understanding _that it was true_, no wonder that norance should never become its proselytes But even as to those who did, while it was a happy deliverance, as we have said, to escape alrossness of popery, still they would carry into their better faith much of the unhappy effect of that previous mental debasement How should a norant of truth in general, have a luminous apprehension of its most important division? There could not be in e to ourselves of Goshen in the preternatural night of Egypt, a space of perfect light, defined out by a precise lieneral darkness

Only consider, that the new ideas ad as the true faith, were to take their situation there in nearly those very sa circumstances of internal barbarism which had been so perfectly co there; and that which had been favorable and adapted in the utree, that which had afforded much of the sustenance of life, to the false notions, could not but be most adverse to the development of the true ones These latter, so environed, would be in a condition too like that of a candle in the ion, therefore, of the uncultivated converts fro, as coe, and force of contrast, duly corresponding to the difference between the lying vanities of priestcraft and a conorance combined with ie of the Refor incapable of adenuine Christianity but with an excessively inadequate apprehension of its attributes;--as in the patriarchal ages a ht have received with only the honors appropriate to a saint or prophet, the visitant in whoel unawares Happy for both that ancient entertainer of such a visitant, and the ignorant but honest adopter of the reforion, when that which they entertained rewarded the to its own celestial quality, rather than in proportion to their inadequate reception We , in special conorance to which barbarisreater nuion, did render that faith beneficial to them beyond the proportion of their narrow and still half superstitious conception of it

And this is, in truth, the consideration theback to that tenebrious period in which popery was slowly retiring, with a protracted exertion of all the craft and strength of an able and veteran tyrant contending to the last for prolonged dominion

It is, however, no consideration of a portion of the people sincere, inquiring, and eloohts in extenuation of that gloorossed by far different circumstances of that period of our history, that we are imposed upon by a spectacle the very opposite ofexhibition that we behold in looking back to the age of Elizabeth?