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Updated: September 18, 2024
The lower and lower-middle classes have always been peculiarly sensitive to the dangers of priestcraft and a relapse into Popery. Accordingly Chubb constantly appealed to this anti-Popish feeling.
And all this had come into existence in a nation which had curbed the power of the monarchy, done away with priestcraft, established the liberty of the Press, set its face against every kind of bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and, through the means of free institutions, taken up the task of governing itself. The inference was obvious: in France also, like causes would lead to like results.
The writer will now say a few words about priestcraft, and the machinations of Rome, and will afterwards say something about himself, and his motives for writing against them. With respect to Rome, and her machinations, much valuable information can be obtained from particular parts of Lavengro, and its sequel.
By some of the dark ingenuities of that age of priestcraft a curious thing was discovered that if you kill every usurer, every forestaller, every adulterater, every user of false weights, every fixer of false boundaries, every land-thief, every water-thief, you afterwards discover by a strange indirect miracle, or disconnected truth from heaven, that you have no millionaires.
The spirit of the Roman religion was however originally, and before the substance of it was sacrificed to foreign ornament, quite different from that of the Grecian. The latter was yielding and flexible to the hand of art, the former immutable beneath the rigorous jealousy of priestcraft.
Men were tired of priestcraft, and by a natural reaction they went to an opposite extreme; they were tired of religion itself. Buddha became an undoubted atheist or agnostic, and six distinct schools of philosophy arose on the basis of the Upanishads some of which were purely rationalistic, some were conservative, others radical.
Nothing but the atmosphere of another innocent soul could shield hers, and she had no friend. What did people do when their brothers did awful deeds? She had heard of praying to God had indeed herself told her brother to pray, but it was all folly worse, priestcraft. As if such things AND a God could exist together!
This was in the early part of Louis Philippe's reign, and under the administration of Guizot. In reading their account of these institutions, we are painfully reminded how much the rising tide of religious liberty has been checked and driven back by the bands of priestcraft and arbitrary power.
The other liberal chiefs chimed in: "The army," said one, "was an absurd expense; it must be put down:" "The world was grown too civilised for war," said another: "The Empress was priest-ridden," said a third: "Churches might be tolerated; Voltaire built a church, but a church simply to the God of Nature, not of priestcraft," and so on.
This is declared to us by the sure voice of experience; this was the fruit of the spirit of priestcraft, with its accompaniments of superstitious rites and lying traditions, in the last decline of the Jewish church; this was the fruit of the same spirit, with the same accompaniments, in the long decay of the Christian church; although, the indestructible virtue of Christ's gospel was manifest in the midst of the evil, and Christ, in every age and in every country, has been known with saving power by some of his people, and his church, in her worst corruptions, has taught many divinest truths, has inculcated many holiest virtues.
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