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Uffi-ACHON AND -REACTION BETWEEN GH-ERCIIES AND
TBfr-WE- GOVERNMENT.
A LECTURE
F. W. NEWMAN,
LATIN PROFESSOR AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON,
AT SOUTH-PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY,
MAY 20, 1860.
Irhrteb Eg request
LONDON:
ALLIANCE DEPOT, 335 STRAND.
MANCHESTER: ALLIANCE OFFICES, 41 JOHN DALTON STREET.
�A LECTURE,
ETC.
It is a notorious fact of ancient and modern times, that very
many politicians who have no belief in religion have upheld
religious creeds as conducive to the national morality : and
they have generally much to say that is plausible in their
defence. Side by side with this, it has been maintained, upon a
large survey of the world, that national morality depends very
little on the avowed creed of nations ; and it may be worth
while to dwell for a moment on the evidence of this fact. I
will begin by contrasting the Turks with the Persians. Ac
cording to the testimony of a series of impartial English
men who have known them well, the peasants of Turkey pro
per are eminently upright, truthful, simple-hearted, honest,
friendly; faithful and devoted in domestic relations,—the
tie of parent and child being peculiarly tender and beautiful.
The Persians, on the contrary, are described as prevailingly
frivolous, false, cheating, and generally without conscience.
Both nations are Mohammedan. It is true, that they are of
different sects. The Persians regard the three first Caliphs
as usurpers, and reject the “traditions of the elders” con
cerning the miracles of Mohammed and various observances.
But none of us will for a moment impute the superiority of
Turkish morality to this ceremonial difference. It undoubt
edly rises out of the social organization, local influences, and
mode of life, which have come down from remote times. We
have a confirmation of this in the fact, that all which is best
in the Turkish character is apt to be lost as soon as the indi
�3
vidual is transplanted, and especially if he be raised into high
office. Yet his Mohammedan creed remains as orthodox as
before. Here then we see, that though a right creed is of
course better than a wrong creed, yet social institutions have
more effect on our moral state than the national religion.
And now look back to Europe. Are not Ireland, France,
Spain, South Germany, and Italy, under the same church ?
Yet how diverse are they morally ! If we had time to con
sider separate virtues and vices, the contrasts would perhaps
seem deeper the longer we dwelt on them. What greater
contrast in manliness can there be than that between Spain
and Naples ? It is conceded to be immense even between
the border countries, Spain and Portugal. What French
man, however patriotic and Catholic, will dare to extol the
French women for chastity 1 Yet, coming of the same race,
and with very much of the same temperament, the Catholic
Irishman justly boasts that the honoui’ of Irish women stands
as high as that of any in the whole world. Again, for long
ages past, who would have seemed uncharitable in rating very
low the truthfulness of the Italians or French ? Yet no one
would have dared so to speak of the Catholic Germans or of
the Spaniards. Again, was not England once Catholic ? Yet
the England of Edward III. and that of Queen Elizabeth are
not in any great moral contrast. I need not go farther. I
have sufficiently indicated on what ground we are forced to
believe that national morality does not depend chiefly on the
theoretic religion, but on those social institutions, habits, and
laws which pervade daily life.
The truth which I have been stating has been often darkly
felt by those who avow as their motto, “ Religion has nothing
to do with politics.” I believe the*se were accurately the words
for which our late eminent statesman Mr. Canning encountered
much obloquy some thirty-five years ago. In his mouth it
meant, that an English Catholic had more of the Englishman
in him than of the Catholic, so that the difference between his
religion and that of the Protestant ought to be overlooked in
Parliament; a doctrine which shortly gained a great prac
�4
tical triumph. My main object in now addressing you, is to
point out the false theory which is founded on this movement
towards a more comprehensive state. Those who desired to
admit Dissenters and Catholics into civil equality with Church
men, who claimed that the State should turn a blind eye to
wards the creed of an individual, were sure to condemn any
public hostility to voluntary religious institutions, and very
generally may have wished that all such institutions should
be left without national endowments. The State being thus,
in their view, neutral towards the sects, they have naturally
claimed that the sects should be neutral towards the State.
They have conceived of Church and State (or, if you prefer so
to phrase it, the Churches and the State) as occupying two
parallel lines of movement which cannot come into collision :
as though the Church were something of the other world alone;
as though its business were with creeds and ceremonies, feasts
and fastings, chanting and prayers, ordination and sacraments,
consolation in sickness and hopes beyond the grave; but had
no right to interfere with laws and customs which make men
moral or immoral. To very many politicians of this class, to
use religious influence against any measures of State is prim&
facie evidence of an ambitious and meddling Church. On the
other hand, they often avow, that in the State it is an erring
obtrusiveness to legislate for the morality of the nation ; and
that all zeal for morality should be yielded up to individuals,
or to voluntary societies.
If this were not a widely-prevailing theory, influencing
public men, often asserted in public journals, and espoused
by those who have a name as political philosophers, I should
not now address you on the other side. But since I regard
this as the cardinal heresy of the Liberal party in both conti
nents,—the heresy which, in proportion as it triumphs, de
moralizes nations, and makes them vacillate between anarchy
and despotism; the heresy which, by the reaction from it,
gives a new life to bigotry, and generates dangerous forms of
socialism,—I think the close examination of it is of urgent
practical importance.
�5
I began by pointing out the evidence lying on the surface
of history, that the morality of nations is more dependent on
laws and institutions than on religious creed. I think I
should hardly overstate in saying, that laws, enactments, in
stitutions of property, and the social relations which rise out
of them (all of which are the sphere of the State), must of
necessity affect the national character for good or evil: hence
the action of the State is essentially either moral or immoral.
But inasmuch as the Churches, or Church, either need not
exist at all, or very often exist in a feeble, cloudy, ceremonial
life, their action on the national morality is apt to be but a
secondary force. Hence, instead of saying with the Ultravoluntaryist, that morality is the sphere of the Church alone,
it is more true to assert, that the State has necessarily a
moral action, the Church only accidentally and occasionally.
And if we admit that Religion rises above a solemn mummery
or a wild fanaticism, only in proportion as morality underlies
it; if we are conscious that Spiritualism is the glorification of
the highest Morality, and that the immoral man cannot be
permanently and consistently spiritual, nor ever reap the
noblest fruits and blessed joys of spirituality; if we feel that
an immoral atmosphere is corrupting to the most of us, and
intensely painful to the best;—then never can those institu
tions and measures of State which make our neighbours and
ourselves moral or immoral be matter of indifference to the
spiritual man ; nor can the religious unions, which we call
Churches, ever wisely cherish neutral sentiment towards them.
The best and noblest churches, however strong and fresh the
religious impetus within them, must necessarily be weakened,
disorganized, and degraded, by prevailing public depravities.
I will add, that when the spiritual influence within them be
comes most intense, most pure, most beneficial, it will produce
permanent results of good only in proportion as it affects
public action or institutions.
It may aid to clear our view of this subject, if I present a
slight sketch historically of the part which religious influence
has played among nations. Civilization begins when brute
�6
force ceases to rule, and the warrior is subjected to the
civilian.
In China perhaps this was effected by the ascend
ency of mere moralists over the State, without any strictly
religious development; but the result was, even more em
phatically, that the State had the cognizance of morality, and
became the moral teacher as well as enforcer. Every where
else, in all the great civilised powers, we find religion to iden
tify itself with civilianism, and to become so incorporated
with the magistracy and laws as to appear to dictate the
whole constitution. In fact, it must have been a struggle
between the men of the sword and the men of mind,—or be
tween a ruling family on the one hand, and a combination of
civilians and warriors on the other,—which resulted in a
compromise, by which the sword ruled under sanction of re
ligious law. But we have seldom any history of the earliest
stage. One thing only I here assert and press,—that, as a
fact, whether we approve it or not, whether we like it or not,
in the whole earlier stage of humanity,—I mean down to the
Christian era,—we know no instance in which a religion pro
duced moral results, or any results but such as we must de
plore, except in so far as it acted upon and through civil
institutions j imparting to them solemnity and permanence,
curbing alike despotism and anarchy, making law moral, and
investing judicial sentences with power over the conscience.
Out of this sprang, and always will spring, the greatness of
nations, even when the theory of the religion is disfigured by
antiquated fable and impure blots.
But the dispersion of the Jews, and the Christianity which
followed, opened a new phase of human existence. A pheno
menon came forth, known previously in the far East, but
unparalleled in the West,—a religion appealing to individual
conviction, and propagated by individual energy, through
many countries, in spite of resistance and persecution from
the civil power. As to certain broad facts concerning this
great movement there can be no mistake. The Roman aristo
cracy, which conquered the Western world, had disorganized
itself by plunder and by civil war, which ended in a military
�7
despotism, so complete within, and so uncontrolled without,
as to become wildly immoral. During the monstrous rule
of the three emperors, Caius Caligula, Claudius, and Nero,
Christianity put forth its first and most signal efforts. The
first churches looked out upon a civil power, which seemed
to be made of iron and clay, without heart or conscience; a
power as unsusceptible of Christian conversion as behemoth
or leviathan. Sacrifice and incense, if offered only to Jupiter
Best and Greatest, might perhaps have been interpreted as to
the True Jehovah ; but when incense to the images of the
Csesars, deceased and living, was the symbol of loyalty, and
as it were the oath of office,—when persecution and death was
inflicted on those who refused the test,—the Christian churches,
from the time of Nero onward, not only despaired of such a
civil power, but pictured it as a hideous and fierce beast, and
impatiently expected its destruction by fire from heaven. To
coalesce with it was “to worship the beast and his image,”
and involved an impious dereliction of the faith. The hostility
thus kindled generated worse distrust, and before long, wider
persecutions. Christ did not return in the clouds of heaven,
at the time they expected him, to overthrow these incurable
iniquities by flaming fire; but the despotism decayed by its
own misrule, and the Goths from the Danube and the Black
Sea began their terrible inroads. At last appeared a prince
on the throne of the Csesars who sought the alliance of the
Christian churches, then already consolidated into a power
ful Organization. From that day the views, the policy, the
aspiration of the Church was changed; and a second era
began.
In this first era, which alone is regarded by many Protes
tants as the time of the Church’s purity, will any one assert
that the impurity of the State was no calamity to the Church ?
We cannot read the apostolic epistles without seeing what
scandalous immoralities were liable to break out in those who
were received as saints. The energy of Christian conviction
to rescue men out of vice and crime was sometimes wonderful,
—then, as in later ages; but to make deep spiritual impres
�8
sions abiding is of all mental tasks the hardest. Habit is the
ever-plodding tortoise which wins the race while the hare is
asleep. Oh, how great the misery to a struggling human soul
to have been reared in profligacy and recklessness of right I
Moreover, he who seemed to be rescued from it by repentance
and faith was not only open to the insidious re-approaches of
old habit; he also of necessity worked and lived with old com
panions, was surrounded by reminiscences of his old offences,
and by all the old solicitations. Where the public institutions
favour vice and crime, and almost enforce it, how many of us
will remain untainted? To touch pitch, and not be defiled;
to walk through fire, and not be burned; to live in the midst
of every thing immoral, and maintain a conscience void of
offence; to be subject to an unscrupulous and exacting supe
rior, and behave to him with modesty and dutiful boldness,
performing all his rightful commands, and refusing his un
rightful,—is a task rather for an angel than for a man. Now
let me ask : If we are truly religious men—I care not under
what name,—if those whom I address are a religious church,
what greater calamity from without could befal you as a reli
gious body, in its religious hopes and aims, than if some evil
demon could suddenly turn the civil institutions of our Eng
land into those of Nero’s Rome? Oh, what a thing it is for
our own moral and religious life to have no slavery among us!
What a thing to have fixed law and fair juries, a police which
cannot plunder and torture, magistrates who cannot arrest
without cause, judges who cannot be terrified by power, soldiers
who are restrained by civil law, and a law which is enforced
equally upon all ranks ! What a thing it is that impurity
dares not to obtrude itself in full glare, usurping art, invading
literature, penetrating into public religion, and dislocating
family relations ! Is it a fond fancy of Englishmen that it is
characteristic of their nation to love fair play, to esteem truth
fulness, to abhor hypocrisies and slanders, to uphold the rights
of the weak, to disapprove all cruel extremes of punishment,
all mere vindictiveness, all making of oneself judge in one’s
own cause ? If in any of these things our boasts are justified,
�9
we owe these good qualities to the laws of the land. Let us
not deceive ourselves. The best foundations of our moral
character come to us as a gift from our predecessors, who have
elaborated our civil institutions. Very imperfect we are ;
but the majority of us would be far worse if the laws of Eng
land were worse ; and if we desire a purer and nobler moral
ity to be wider spread and more permanent, we must desire
and seek the removal of all those public regulations and cus
toms which are experienced to be corrupting ; we must aid
every movement towards a purer condition of the whole social
state.
But what did the Christian Church in her second age ?
Of course, her bishops, before often haughty and overbearing,
became now, equally often, ambitious and worldly, bent on
aggrandizing in wealth and power the religious community
from which their greatness sprang. I have no thought at
present to attack nor to palliate this conduct. But, measure
their evil as you please, of their good we now reap the fruits ;
precisely because they fundamentally abandoned the original
limitation of Christian effort, and embraced the institutions
of this world in the sphere of the Church’s action. To the
apostles’ eyes the saints were nothing but an elect remnant,
snatched out of an evil world which was soon about to be de
stroyed by fire. They laboured for to-day, not for a morrow
which might never come. They tried to relieve the poor, but
not to remove the causes of poverty; to rescue the vicious, but
not to extirpate the social roots of vice; to comfort and teach
the slave, but not to overthrow slavery; to defy evil law and
wicked governors, but not to displace and replace them. Their
whole action was upon individuals, not upon society; it was
palliative, not radical; and hence its benefit was in many
great countries of the world temporary only, and barely
touched a fraction of the people. The Christian Church of the
fourth century had built up its theoretic creed out of a mo
saic of biblical texts, commented on in the spirit alternately
of a Rabbinist and of a Neo-Platonist. But if on the side of
the creed it manifested a weak understanding, yet in its eccle
�10
siastical action it used the freest judgment, never tying itself
down to the precedent or precepts of apostles who lived in a
world differently circumstanced ; but it undertook to remould
the State, to infuse a new spirit into law, and claim the whole
realm of the magistrate as the domain of the Church, that is,
of Christ and of God. So long as the Church was morally
higher than the State, the ambition of churchmen, however
grasping and occasionally unscrupulous, was on the whole, of
course, an immense benefit: and in that period of six or seven
centuries, while barbarous invasion or riotous internal conflict
tormented nearly all Europe, the Church in superadding her
sanction to law and social institutions infused somewhat of
broadly humane and moral aims. Those ecclesiastics assuredly
made a great many mistakes, as fallible men will, and sowed
much tare with their wheat. Judge their evil as severely as you
choose, it will nevertheless remain true that we owe to them
the moral reorganization of the State,—a basis on which fresh
and fresh growths of good take place and shall take place.
We Protestants are too accustomed to think solely of the
later stage of this history. We think of the Romish clergy as
jealous of the cultivated laity, as animated by a narrow idolatry
of church power, as claiming for churchmen an impunity of
crime, crushing freedom among the clergy themselves, distorting
or debauching society by monkery, nunnery, clerical celibacy,
and auricular confession j in short, sacrificing moral ends to
ecclesiastical glorification : finally, as convulsing Europe with
war, and rending States with civil contention, in order to uphold
a worn-out creed and the preposterous claims of a foreign priest.
I name all this, lest, being unknown to many who hear me, I
may seem to overlook, to doubt, or to defend it. I do not. But
while I reprobate the evil ambition of Rome, and very much
beside, I nevertheless defend, approve, and thank that good
ambition, with which at an earlier time she made it a religious
effort to improve the public institutions of barbarous Europe.
In the most far-going and active Protestantism the very
same tendency appeared, as in Calvin, in Knox, in the Puri
tans. All of these regarded it as a first object of importance
�11
with the religious man to make the institutions of the State
virtuous; and much permanent benefit, it is universally agreed,
has remained from this to Scotland and to New England. The
rock on which they all split is only too notorious. They iden
tified Virtue with their own private creed, instead of inter
preting it from the most highly developed conscience of men
and nations. They tried to enforce what cannot be enforced,
and limit what cannot be limited, measuring all minds by their
own, as though they had the infallibility against which they
rebelled. Reaction and indignation was sure to follow, from
those reared in their own bosom. It began among us with the
sects of the Independents and Quakers, and with the writings
of Locke; it has been reinforced from the school of Bentham :
and now, from hatred of Established Churches, and dread of
Over-legislation and Communism, the error spreads wide, that
the State can do little, and is not bound to do any thing, for
moral improvement; and that the business of religious men,
and religious communities as such, is not at all to act upon
or through the public institutions.
But does any one seriously believe that the State can do
little, or rather does not at present do much, for moral interests ?
What if it were to sanction polygamy ? Must we go to the
Mormons, or to the universally decaying Mohammedan powers,
to ask the probable consequences ? If it threw open the trade
of gambling, betting-houses and lotteries, have the churches
so much spare energy, kept in reserve, that they could coun
teract the demoralizing influences which are now pent up ?
Indecent and corrupting exhibitions or gatherings, which evade
the existing law, are at present believed to perpetrate much
moral mischief in our great towns. And if you duly consider
how willing a fraction of mankind is to enrich itself by acting
the tempter and promoting vice, can any of you doubt how
grave an addition to our existing vice would be caused, if every
vile man were allowed by law to thrust upon our children such
sights and sounds as more mature years know to poison the
fountains of youthful peace, innocence, and love 1 In the year
1830, grave statesmen and economists talked learnedly on the
�12
efficacy of free-trade in beer to promote sobriety. Free beer
houses were established by the consent of both sides of Parlia
ment ; but in four years’ time a select committee of the Com
mons, likewise composed of both sides of the House, judicially
pronounced that a flood of vice had been set loose by the
measure. Several select committees of both Houses have since
declared themselves on the subject, always confirming this
fact; yet it pleases the larger part of the press of England to
shut its eyes, and pretend that the State can do nothing for
morality. If time allowed, it would not be difficult to show,
in numberless ways, how the action of public law is either a
depraving or an improving influence. That we often are not
aware of this, is a result, and in part a means, of its very effi
cacy. As a child has all its habits determined for it by the
rules of the family, and moves in leading-strings unawares, so
is it largely with the nation that has once become accustomed
to the regulations of State. Habit is the great regulator of
conduct, and hereby of morality. The atmosphere which we
are ever breathing, without observing it, is the main source
of health or of sickness.
But let me ask, how have the voluntary churches and soli
tary individuals in these later days rendered their good per
manent to society ? As far as I am aware, the earliest phi
lanthropist of Protestant times was William Penn the Quaker.
Of State-Churches he disapproved; but his celebrity for doing
good on any large scale must surely rest on his public laws
and institutions in Pennsylvania. In the next century John
Howard, the visitor of prisons, was the most celebrated phi
lanthropist. Of how little comparative avail would his career
have been, if he had merely relieved the sufferings of indivi
dual prisoners ! His real efficacy was through the political
authorities, by stimulating them to improve the public regula
tions ; and through this, he is a benefactor of Europe down
to the present moment. So, again, the great religious move
ment of Wesley and Whitfield was not a mere reform in
private life, but marked its moral success in public law, its
effect on which is left permanently in regard to fairs, wakes,
�13
revels, and other public gatherings, once sources of demorali
zation, of which many are now suppressed, others are chastised.
Once more, the greatness of Clarkson and Wilberforce as phi
lanthropists does not rest on their charities in private life,
but on the extinction of West-Indian slavery and the over
throw of public lotteries. The labours of the philanthropist
seem always to find their legitimate goal in the amelioration
of public institutions ; for so only is the evil against which
he is warring brought to its minimum. Bad institutions,
acting on the less developed and imperfect minds, generate
mischief far more rapidly than any argument of reason or of
pure religion can check it. The further moral progress of
mankind is to be looked for by regulations which hinder the
corruption of the weak and ignorant by the cunning, the co
vetous, and the lustful. To make a trade of corruption is the
highest of all offences against the social union. In proclaim
ing this, I utter no new political doctrine, but one ever avowed
in England, and confirmed by many laws which are in daily
active life. Yet the doctrine needs, I think, to be made more
prominent to the conscience of the nation, and to be more
pressed on the religious, as a clue to their own duties. In the
last thirty or forty years we have become acquainted with that
phrase, “ the dangerous classeswe have learnt that there
is within our nation another nation, separated from it men
tally, morally, religiously,—a nation of criminals born from
criminals, living chiefly on plunder,—barbarous in the midst
of civilization. Many self-denying efforts have been systemati
cally made by Ragged Schools and Town Missionaries to reach
this population. If I were competent to measure, yet this is
no place to measure, the amount of good thus effected, and
how far it keeps pace with the progress of the evil. But to
me it seems perfectly clear, that the State has no right to ex
pect the diseases of its body to be removed year after year by
the zeal of private philanthropy; and that the rightful result
of these efforts is, that those at whose sacrifice they are made
should prevail with the public authorities to prevent the evils
in an earlier stage. After it has been shown (and I think it
�14
has already been shown) what is the utmost which voluntary
zeal can effect, it becomes clearer what the State must under
take. Two causes, it is notorious, chiefly, if not solely, gene
rate “the dangerous classes”—seduction of women, and the
retail trade in intoxicating drink. Hence it is clear in what
direction the State has, in the first instance, to move, in order
to counteract the evil.
Very few indeed of us can take up (what I may call) the
profession of philanthropy; the rest of us are perhaps apt to
think that they fully do their part, if, having found some
agency to which they can trust, they support it by one or
more annual guineas. That is all well and right in itself;
but if the agency is only palliative, if it aspire only to cure
partially, not to prevent evil, something earlier remains
to be done, and it must be done by the civil community
itself
This truth was discerned by the founder of one other phi
lanthropic movement, which proved wholly abortive, through
the enormous errors mingled with it; nevertheless its moral
strength was derived from its firm grasp of a truth which the
opposite schools were holding every day more loosely; the
doctrine that man cannot he perfected in isolation; that his
social union has a higher object than that of the market; that
his virtue, feeble in the individual, becomes strong by mutual
support; that in proportion as we are immature, our will is
puerile, and we are the creatures of our circumstances; and
that it is the proper business of the local civil community to
promote the training of all to industry and to virtue. I allude
to the late Robert Owen of Lanark, the founder of English
Socialism, a true philanthropist (I believe) in heart, though
his public schemes were impossible, and his moral theories all
ill balanced, some of them monstrous. A part of his aims has
been adopted by those who call themselves Christian Socialists,
in whom it is easy to discern (side by side with very question
able opinions of another sort) a wholesome intensity of convic
tion that our nation is forgetting the duty of the State to use
its vast power for moral good. Against us all, in every capa
�15
city, public or private, it is a fixed truth, that “ Whosoever
knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”
If plunder and fightings, fires and murder, abounded in
our streets, we should cry aloud and protest to our magis
trates and rulers, imploring more vigorous measures. Let us
hope that some higher motive than selfish fear would inspire
the protest. But alas, when the evil threatens not ourselves,
but those who are morally weaker than we, our outcry is far
too tranquil. If the daughters or sisters of others are seduced,
if the families of others are ruined by the public solicitations
to drunkenness, we are apt to think it is no case for our com
plaint. Yet surely to shelter the weak in mind from exces
sive temptation is as much a duty of society as to rescue the
weak in body from attack ; and as to drunkenness it is a duty
which the State, for four centuries and upwards, has deliber
ately and avowedly assumed. Let no religious churches fancy
that God has reserved for them corporately an isolated and pe
culiar goodness. They are in great measure products of their
age and nation, and partake of its evil. They cannot be made
perfect without the surrounding community. If there is what
Frenchmen call a solidarity between nation and nation, each par
taking of the other’s good, each in some measure afflicted by the
other’s evil, so that each is in some sense responsible for all,—
much more is this true of the natives of the same country, mem
bers of the same State, dwellers in the same locality, partners
in daily transactions or company. If the law acts well for our
moral good, because we are strong, but works ill to our neigh
bours because they are weak; — conduce as it may to the
energy of the self-controlled, yet if it ensure a harvest of crime
and debauchery under the windows of our happy homes, indeed
it is a selfish and short-sighted principle in us to be contented
and silent. England has long been heart-sick under a sense that
religion has unduly been severed from the affairs of daily life.
We long for a religion that shall be at once deep-hearted and
practical. Whatever the professional politicians think or do
not think, the nation at large is as weary of the personal ques
tions which divide statesmen as of the theological quarrels on
�16
which sects are founded. The nation is very competent to
discriminate repartee from wisdom, malicious speech from
earnestness of heart; and out of the earnestness of its own
heart has a natural right to claim that the moral welfare of
the many shall never be sacrificed to the exchequer, nor to
party. Nay, I will add, this is conceded and avowed on both
sides by those who declare themselves to be party-men. Hence,
without a struggle to dislocate existing entanglements, the
moral earnestness of the religious unions of this nation, when
it joins in one prayer, has forthwith a great, a mighty force
with Parliament and with the Throne. The claim rising from
us all, that the authorities, central and local, armed by the
law, shall put down public solicitations to corruption, and
shall thereby help us and those weaker than some of us to
avoid ruinous vice, will never be mistaken for ecclesiastical
ambition or democratic disaffection. There is therefore a real
and great power resting in the churches, just in proportion to
their moral simplicity and earnestness,—a power which they
cannot innocently disuse. All that is needful is, that they
shall speak from the heart of all good men, not from their own
private heads, and plead with the organs of the State for that
virtue on which we all agree, not for that theology on which
we so deeply differ. This is reasonable ; for the State belongs
to us in common, and no man or sect may claim to work it
for private ends. This also is on the side of spiritual advance
ment ; for the higher the morality of the nation, the better
material it affords for a truly spiritual church. Oh, what a day,
worth living for and worth dying for, that would be, in which
all the good and pure-hearted should cooperate to abate every
palpable immorality of the land! The common action would
teach them a common esteem. Their unwise animosities
would drop off. Cultivating simplicity of eye, they would
find their whole souls full of light; and without proselytisms,
controversies, or heart-burnings, a new and real reformation
would be begun.
ROBSON, LEVEY, AND FRANKLYN, GREAT NEW STREET AND FETTER LANE, E.C.
r
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
Publisher
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The action and reaction between churches and the civil government.
Creator
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Newman, Francis William [1805-1897]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London; Manchester
Collation: 16 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: A lecture by F.W. Newman, Latin Professor at University College London, at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, May 20 1860. The original title crossed out by unknown hand and added in ink "Moral Influence of Law". From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Robson, Levey and Franklyn, Fetter Lane, London.
Publisher
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Alliance Depot; Alliance Offices
Date
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1860
Identifier
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CT76
Subject
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Religion
Politics
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The action and reaction between churches and the civil government.), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Church and State-England
Conway Tracts
Morality
Religion
Religion and politics