The Church is now the Theatre of the Drama of the Books of Common Prayer, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Old and New Testament; to which is generally added a sermonic epilogue or exhortation, commonly called a Sermon.
Be not offended at my use of the word Theatre here: no other would substitute. Its root is the Greek [———], God, and signified originally, the house, place or stage, where the Drama of Theism or attributes of Deity were exhibited. The word is now much distorted from its root, in being made to describe the place of modern dramatic performances.
Nor must the word Drama be objected to; because the ceremony of the Church was originally so constructed, so meant, and so practised, as I will prove in the course of this letter.
Even the word Tragedy has its root in the Greek word [———], a goat, and signifies, in the dramatic exhibition of Theism, the death of the year, under the form of a personification, in the twelfth or zodiacal month of the goat. So that the death sorrowed for and lamented, was, dramatically, the apparent death of the sun, the death of the year, in the sign or month of the goat; and on St. Thomas's day, as we read in the Prophet Ezekiel, chap. viii. v. 14—"and behold there sat women weeping for Tammuz;" and v. 16—"about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east," which is no other than a representation of the performance of the tragedy, in which the performers had lost the moral of the Lord's Temple: precisely the present state and condition of the Church. All ancient mythology is in harmony with this conclusion; and the Christian tragedy is only a continued version, uniting the general drama of human morals with the annual tragedy of solar physics, and forming a two-fold or two-keyed allegory or mystery, physical and moral, as it was known even in the Celtic or Druid Church. Christianity was never new, or young, in this country, by existing records.
There are not many persons in this secret, perhaps, not even you, the first Minister of the country; so it will be deemed too abstruse and mystical on which to find a warrant for legislation or change of law: but I strenuously maintain, that such was the origin of the Christian Church, and such is now its generally lost meaning. The proof of the solar part of the allegory is not so much to my present purpose as the proof of the general drama of human morals being the basis of the present mystery of the Christian Church.
To stay a growing difficulty, we must go to the root:—it will grow again, if we do not go to the root. It will be so with the present Church, and all attempts to reform it.
In plainer language, then, I will describe the existing Church, as having, in its ceremonies and business, the mystery of the Christian Religion, without its revelation; that all the defects and all the grounds of dissent from it are the absence of the revelation, or want of knowing the meaning of the mystery. Whatever are called its doctrines, are all mysterious; its discipline is equally mysterious, and by its present ministers, unaccountable. Dissenters have dissented without being able to assign a reason for their dissent, and have set up for themselves something equally mysterious and unaccountable; and so the whole principle and practice of Religion in the country is in confusion and conflict; and no measure can reconcile the dissentients, short of developing the first principles of the Church and the Christian Religion, the one language, the one course of reason, the one ground of human welfare, the one system of morals, which is now buried in a Babel of confused tongues, doctrines, idol-houses, and superstitious ceremonies.
The ground, then, on which I proceed, is, that TO REFORM THE CHURCH, THE DISSENTERS MUST BE ANNIHILATED.
Not annihilated by slaughter or physical force; but by superior knowledge, and consequent superior teaching, by openness, by honesty, by throwing off the mask of hypocrisy, and leaving the Church of Christ to be no longer a theatre of dramatic ceremony in mystery, with parts and actors as ignorant as automata of their subject, and who not knowing, can value it not, beyond the salaries they receive for its performance in unrevealed mystery.
Can that be a Reform of the Church, with "just claims upon the respect and affections of the people," which shall leave a ground and excuse for dissent by any one of the people? I say, NO. Can it be a Church of Christ? I say, NO. Do we know what a Church of Christ is in reality? For myself, I say, YES. A Church, too, founded upon an understanding of the Sacred Scriptures, of the Old and New Testament, upon the revelation of the mystery of those Scriptures, and upon all the first principles essential and conducive to general human and social welfare; that shall no more admit of dissent than the multiplication table, or the accurately placed sun-dial, than the elements of Euclid, and all the never-failing tests of the science of chemistry. The Apostle that told us to "prove all things, and hold fast that which is good," gave us a definition of the exhortation of the Evangelist or the Baptist—"Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand." A repenting and a proving people are necessary to make a Church of Christ. Repentance and enquiry are the pillars and foundations of that Church; without repentance and enquiry there can be no Church of Christ; and I ask, confidently ask, with the assurance that a true answer must be in the negative,—has anything calling itself a Christian Church in Europe, established by law, or dissenting from such an establishment, anything to do with the two principles of repentance and proving, the one meaning reflection by animadversion, the other a trial by outward tests of that reflection? There is not a congregation of people in Europe, calling itself a Church, that is founded upon an understanding of the Sacred Scriptures, the understanding which shows that the "letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life."