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    justice to individual character ; is not then the dissenting ministry a craft ? And does it not diffuse a more subtle poison than the more noisy craft , the roaring lion of the establishment ? Some taint of this description may , we fear , be found in modern puritanism , and perhaps , ' Friends are not wholly free . How do they sometimes deal with heretics ? And in what manner does their body decide

    the questions which come before them ? Is it by a fair ballot , or by the sense of a majority taken in any way ? There are recollections of proceedings connected with the names of Thomas Foster , in this country , and of Hannah Barnard , and Elias Hicks , in

    America , which it were well could they be obliterated - There is some craft here ; and if not priestcraft , its offspring , perhaps ; not bearing the name , because not legitimate . We are sorely deceived both by travellers and natives , unless priestcraft be rife in America , though they have no establishment , and , probably , more real religion than any other nominally Christian country .

    We conclude with our author ' s conclusion , hoping that his little book will widely circulate , that it will produce in many minds feelings like those which it has excited in our own ; and that it will aid in bringing on that spiritual renovation which is so preeminently to be desired for our country . 4 From age to age , the great spirits of the world have raised their voices and cried , liberty ! but the cry has been drowned by the clash of arms , or the brutish violence of uncultured mobs . Homer and

    Demosthenes in Greece , Cicero in Rome , the poets and martyrs of the middle ages , our sublime Milton , the maligned , but immovable servant and sufferer of freedom , who laid down on her altar his peace , his comfort , and his very eye-sight ; our Harnpdens and Sidneys ; the Hofers and Bolivars of other lands , have , from age to age , cried " . Liberty ! " but ignorance and power have been commonly too much for them . But at length , light from the eternal sanctuary of truth

    has spread over every region ; into the depths and the dens of poverty it has penetrated ; the scholar and the statesman are compelled to behold in the marriage of Christianity and Knowledge , the promise of the establishment of peace , order , and happiness , the reign of rational freedom . We are on the very crisis in which old things are to be pulled down , and new ones established on the most ancient of foundations—justice to the people . To effect safely this momentous

    change > requires all the watchfulness and the wisdom of an intelligent nation . The experience of the world's history , warns us to steer the Bafe middle course , between the despotism of the aristocracy and the mob , between the highest and the lowest orders of society . The intelligence , and not the wealth or multitudes of a state , must giv ^ e the

    law of safety ; and to this intelligence I would again and finally say , be warned by universal history ! Snatch from your priesthood all political power ; abandon all state religion ; place Christianity on its own base—the universal heart of the people ; let your preachers be as your schoolmasters , simply teachers ; eschew reverend justices of the peace , very reverend politicians , and right reverend peers and legis-

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    506 History of Priestcraft .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1833, page 506, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2618/page/66/