The change which I propose will be tantamount to a national change from diseased and crippled infancy to healthy adolescence. General man has not yet had fair play. No Nation, the history of which is known, has made a real effort to promote the happiness of all its members. Class has preyed upon class; idleness has been claimed as a privilege on one side, and slavery, through force, been made an inevitable duty on the other. For the furtherance of such a state of society, superstition has been encouraged, that a pompous class might be decorated to preach submission among the labourers to the Spirit of Tyranny and Imposture that was riding riotously over them. There can be no liberty and solid happiness among a superstitious people; and all attempts, at what is called political reform, that leave the people mentally rotting in superstition, will be abortive. I take credit for one fact—that there has been no change made in the political spirit of this country through any other medium than warfare with superstition; for the baneful and blighting spirit of that superstition admitted not of the thought of any other change.
There is a glimpse of light latent to show that all the monastic institutions, the temples, the abbeys, priories, convents, nunneries, the mysteries, the churches, synagogues, and oratories, were originally instituted as schools of useful knowledge; and for what other good purpose could they have been instituted? The better part of the human mind is now making an effort to restore the purity of that state of things. Nothing short of this can tend to harmonize the human race in their several nations, with this improvement upon the past, that all, and not a class only, be educated. It was this education of a class only that has created all the mischief of superstitious society. The class educated has imposed untruths upon the uneducated class, until education itself to that class became swallowed up in imposture; and now both preacher and hearer may be truly said to be alike ignorant of all the great truths that are important to man, and necessary to social welfare. In the way in which the Bible is now read, after being printed, no preachers or teachers are necessary: to have been taught to read is sufficient. Give every man his Bible from Church Property, after teaching him to read, and the present Church business is completed: but much otherwise is my view of the subject. There is not a man living that has now a thorough understanding of the contents and meaning of the Bible. Many are working for the restoration of its lost science; and it is a subject worthy of a Church.
It may startle a First Lord of the Treasury into new thought, to be told, that neither of the Books of the Bible is a piece of human history, not a history of beings like you, me, or any one else. I have given up all idea of the kind as untenable and indefensible. It may startle the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is supposed to have the counting or reckoning of millions of money yearly, and contemplating that Giant of Despair—the Debt, to be told, that the Bible is fundamentally a mathematical book; and that he who does not so understand it, understands it not at all, or but in a very small degree, as to its moral bearing. The Duke of Sussex can give you an opinion on this head, as to the Bible being a book of algebraical science; though, perhaps, he would not like to say it applied to astronomical motion, and was a record of time so calculated through myriads of ages. A Bishop should understand this. It is a book of much more importance than has been made of it in the last thousand years in England. If the Bishops were required to have studied this book before they took office, we should find them generally as lean and as sallow as a lawyer who has to wade through the statutes at large, and law reports as large, for his sort of knowledge; a knowledge that I do not like, and will have none of, but what is forced upon me. No kind of knowledge is requisite to make a modern Bishop. The very origin of the title of a Bishop is that of an astronomical seer, a looker-out or overseer of the subordinate offices of science. There is a plenty of work, so as to allow of no idleness in any office of the Church, if justice be done to the people; and I will not grudge a thousand pounds a-year as a salary to a competent Bishop, or even more than that, if the Property of the Church will afford it. Ignorant fools they must have been, to have allowed so important, so honourable and dignified an office to become corrupt, and to fall into disrepute among the people.
This algebraical reading of the Bible subdues all idea of contradiction to any science, geology for instance, chemistry or any other science, as well as of the apparent language of the book in letter to letter. For instance, the letter-objecting Infidels have laid great stress on Moses being set forth as having seen God; when the author of the Gospel according to Saint John says "No man hath seen God at any time." This is ignorantly set down as a clear contradiction. The explanation is, that Moses was not a man; and then there is no appearance of contradiction. One is mythologically, and the other morally, true.
The Hebrew and Greek alphabets, being numerical as well as literal signs, which was probably the case with all other ancient languages, and these accumulating large numbers, by additional points, it is impossible that we can have a clear understanding of the meaning of their mythological sacred books, without a full algebraical knowledge of the language; and this explains how the letter killeth or stupifieth, while the spirit or knowledge of the entire meaning alone giveth life or understanding. The deepest investigators of the Hebrew Bible of this day maintain that it should be algebraically understood as a book of astronomical science—as a record of time by astronomical motion, which, physically speaking, can alone be the WORD OF THE WORKS OF GOD.
The only true religion must be founded in man's reasonable comprehension; all other pretences to it are presumptions and nonsense to be condemned. We may as properly speak of religious horses and cows, as of men who are ignorant of the subject, substance and meaning, of what is religion. Saint Anthony's preaching to fishes is not without its simile in the practical part of that which has been mistakenly called the Christian Religion. That which is in practice, under the name of the Christian Religion, among many grades of Dissenters, is a disgrace to the government of the country, and to the name of civilized society: it grows worse and worse. Madness is beginning to be added to mystery; or is now produced by the mystery without the key of revelation. Through revelation there can be healthy excitement and enthusiasm; but none through mystery.
Our King is not now the head of a Church, nor the King of a People: he can only be truly described as the head or King of Dissenters, which is an office much more troublesome and dangerous than honourable. To his Ministers, the present state of religious mind must be a prolific source of trouble; and has, I believe, made them persecutors, where the inclination of their own hearts was not coincident with the act. The Dissenters are now much less tolerant than the law-established Church; and if they are not undermined by my proposition, it will not take them many years to undermine that Church, or to demand a share of its property. To be able to see this, it is only necessary that we be acquainted with the workings of human nature, where not under the controul of knowledge.
I am not content that the Established Church shall stand merely as one among Dissenting Churches; no Minister of State should be so content: the King is thereby dishonoured, and the State in disorder. I would have it a Church morally dominant and militant against all error, as it always should be, and as it was in the beginning. The meaning of the word militant has been entirely lost, in the growth of mystery and decay of revelation in the Church. There is a great talk now about revelation, or of something revealed in the Church; but there is no reality in the revelation. There is a mystery pregnant with revelation; but not in itself the revelation. It is a fountain of knowledge, but the genius of man must draw it out. It is good for nothing, but has caused a world of mischief, where read and understood as merely by the letter, as we read an ordinary book of history. The Church now wants the revelation or spirit. Not one of those existing has a particle of spirit.
My proposition for a Reform will annihilate infidelity as well as dissent. There is no infidelity toward knowledge. It has been ignorance all through, on both sides, that has raised the cry of infidelity: each has been unequal to teaching. The Infidel has rejected that literal reading which the professing believer could not defend; because he did not understand its relation, as mystery to revelation. Both, in fact, have been alike Infidels. If I have been the chief of Infidels, I will atone for it in becoming the chief defender of revelation, and the faith, as it is in Christ Jesus, and not as it is in any Dissenting Church. Already the ignorant Infidels murmur at what they mistakenly call my apostacy, while no member of any existing Church holds out a hand to my welcome.
As the Church goes now, it is not required that its Ministers be learned men: they have nothing to do for which talent is requisite—it is a mere school-boy's task; and even among the Dissenters, where the prayer and preaching is extemporaneous, it is not learning, but memory and habit, that are required. In the Church, as I would have it reformed, not only learning but talent to teach would be necessary; and the Ministers would rise to Bishoprics, not through family or political interest, but through preparation and capability to fill the office; for it would be required of them to be first-rate scholars and practical men in display of science, that sort of science, too, of which they are now so much afraid—the unlimited knowledge of things, rather than of languages.