mind. It is not made up of building and clergy; but of the people,
the proper depositaries of mind. Property belonging to the Church
is property belonging to the People, sacred to the preservation,
strengthening, and increase of mind or knowledge. It has been
monopolized dishonestly by the Clergy; and, in that sense, they have
been robbers as well as deceivers of the people. This is the matter to
be reformed, and nothing short of this will be reform. In Tithes,
the people stand as the original proprietors of the land, the true
inheritors of its tithes and first-fruits. Other rent is a minor
consideration of value in labour or capital bestowed on the land. We
must come back to this by some means or other.
The office of King, as head of the Church, is a clerical office--the
crown both of the Church and the State; and, for the sustentation of its
true splendour and dignity, the man or woman filling the office should
be the first scholar and most wise and virtuous being of the Nation.
Whether this is a principle to be conveyed by hereditary descent, I do
not stop to enquire; but the true hereditary principle of church office
is talent and moral character; upon which, I doubt if any improvement
can be made for purposes of state. Originally, in this island, Church
and State were but one. The branching into two has been the result of
wars and evil passions, to distinguish between the instructive and the
destructive offices, hierarchy founded upon knowledge would be equal
to all that society wants as government. State, as well as Church,
signifies the People. As the latter relates to their minds, knowledge,
or spiritual affairs, so the former expresses their politics and civil
arrangements, their local and temporal affairs: they may be well united
in one common interest, and under one common authority, in the reign of
a people devoted to the acquisition of knowledge.
It is matter of curious observation to see how the use of names among
political parties is abused, and how they get reversed in applicable
meaning. The class that has lately taken the title of Conservatives, is
the class that, by the showing of this letter, has been destructive of
everything valuable in our Institutions, so that we have the name only
left, without any virtuous principle that formerly existed in
those Institutions. We have the evidence of this in all the present
difficulties of the country, both in Church and State. The ancestors of
this class have not known how, or not cared to preserve those ancient
Institutions in their original purity; and the class now wanted is
the class of Restoratives, of men whose knowledge, wisdom, honesty
and virtue, will enable them to purge out the accumulated errors of
centuries, and restore the Institutions of the country to their pristine
purity. I grant that this class is not found among the men who are
commonly called or claim to be called Radical Reformers: there is as
much ignorance in that class as in any other. But they certainly are
not likely to be more destructive than they who call themselves
Conservatives; for these have left nothing to be destroyed. The true
and real aim of the men now called Radicals is to begin something
a-new. Their profession of respect for existing Institutions is hollow,
hypocritical and deceitful. I have had acquaintance enough with them to
know that; and more than for the reminiscence of which I can now find
respect. Still they will supersede both Tory and Whig, if these do not
something upon the principle of a true restoration of Institutions to
original and best principles. I would have the Radicals treated as the
Dissenters: leave them no ground of complaint, and so annihilate them.
A wise King or a wise Minister would see that the time is now come
at which that step should be taken, and that further delays will be
dangerous to every man in office. Necessary Institutions, if destroyed
for a time, will rise again. I fear no kind of change as to the prospect
of future advantage.
Is not the idea horrible, and of the worst description, that a Church
and King, or Church and State, should exist and hold together on no
better tenure than a military power; than that of an army constantly
under arms to keep the people from carrying their complaints to an
extent disagreeable or alarming to the men in office? Yet such is all
that you can boast of in the present state of the Institutions of the
country. These Institutions did not originate under the protection of an
army; nor did they, at their origination, require an army to protect
and keep them in existence. An army is a disgraceful appendage, and
destructive of every good principle in the Church:--it is not an
honourable appendage to the office of King. To the people, it is a
burthen and an immoral pest; less requisite in this island than in a
continental nation. Give the people knowledge in their Churches, and
they will soon dispense with an army.
Evils accumulate because there is error at the bottom. There is now
no People's Church: it is, as now existing, a Church of the Clergy,
engrossing and wasting a large property of the people's due to a most
valuable social purpose. The Dissenters have only made the matter worse,
in new exactions for no new benefits. Not one tittle of good, not a
particle of utility, now proceeds from the Clergy toward the people.
They are obstacles to the people's welfare, and their use of means of
provision for a new and better Church.
God is the subject of man's adoration. But what is God? Man is but
an idiot if he professes adoration beyond his understanding. Indeed,
worship is but a synonymy of reason and its cultivation; and as we
say:--_how can we reason but from what we know?_ so we may as truly
say:--_how can we worship what we do not know?_ There is no
worship without knowledge; all other pretence to it is idolatry and
superstition. I have not space to enter upon this topic largely here;
but a voluminous treatise on the word GOD will be the subject of my next
Essay. For the purpose of this illustration of what the Church is, and
what it ought to be, I can say correctly, that God, as the aggregate of
existence, is known to be a physical and moral power. We have distinct
ideas of this two-fold power. The American Indians, who speak of God as
a Great Spirit, make the best general definition of the word that can be
made, and appear to me to have the clearest, purest and wisest idea
of Deity, as far as the regulation of their actions by that word is in
question,--the pursuit of knowledge, by the use of letters and figures
excepted. It corresponds with the emphatic declaration of the Gospel
according to Saint John, chap. iv., v. 24:--"God is a Spirit, and they
that worship must worship in spirit and in truth"--which means what I
have before stated, that they must know what they worship before they
can worship. There is evidence of physical as well as moral spirit. Both
are seen in man, and constitute what may be termed the Spirit of Man.
The one in man is worshipped or cultivated by attention to health; the
other by attention to mental improvement or increased acquisition of
knowledge. Speaking of God, as the aggregate and source of physical
and moral spirit, of which man is a part or unit, we experience that we
cannot alter our physical construction, or physical spirit, other than
by attention to rules of health in the law of nature; but we can, by
study and labour, greatly alter the state of mind or moral spirit. It
is here we draw from God as from a fountain; and this asking, seeking,
drawing from God, constitutes the whole principle of right prayer and
worship, and the structure of the true Christian Church; other than
which, I declare, is worship of the Devil and not of God. And I do not
shrink from saying, that, as revelation is light and knowledge of God,
and mystery is darkness and presence of the Devil, there has not through
the last fifteen hundred years, the dark ages, throughout Europe, been
carried on any other kind of worship than Devil-worship, and evil has
been the fruit thereof. It was under this knowledge that I was moved to
exhibit the effigy of the Devil arm in arm with the Bishop, in the
front of my house and in several prints, for which I am now suffering
imprisonment, like all other martyrs to truth, punished for acting upon
my knowledge. My purpose was good, to open the eyes of my neighbours and
passers by. It might have inconvenienced some of them; but such is the
effect of every newly-published truth in eradication of error: your
Reform of the Church, be it what it may, will inconvenience the Bishops
and some of the Clergy. There would be no Devil, if there were not
pleasure in Hell as well as in Heaven; as pardon can be had by asking
for it. If all evil were naturally punished, we should not want penal
laws.
As true worship is a getting of a knowledge of God, so it follows, that
the Ministry of the Church should consist of a teaching that knowledge,
which is not now the case; for nothing as knowledge is in the Church
taught.
There can be nothing more clear in mathematical demonstration, than
that, as God is a Spirit, of which man may partake, the participation
must increase with that only which can increase in man--the amount of
his knowledge. The whole declaration of the Christian Creed, read by the
spirit, is, that God is the Spirit of Knowledge, the thing known, the
principle of omniscience; and that man approaches and lives with God, as
his mind expands in the accumulation of knowledge. A Bishop may write
or preach spiritually or metaphysically by the year, and he can make no
more of the word God, of his Church, or of himself, than I have made.
The subject now wants a radical reform in the human mind.
I have mentioned, in a former page, that the Jews can trace no
nationality to the time of the Emperor Alexander of Macedon. The highest
antiquity that can be given to them as a colony, is the time of Ptolomy
Lagus, who began to encourage science and literature in Alexandria; and,
from that time, nothing but a colony could they have ever been. It
is not in a nationality that the original character of a Jew is to be
estimated, but in a philosophic character dispersed among the nations; a
people devoted to science; and so a chosen or select, because a learned
people. There is no resemblance in character between an ancient and a
modern Jew:--the name is an Asiatic name of God; and can only apply to
a race of men in the sense of having perfected human nature, which it is
very probable the ancient Jews had done, as far as it was then possible
to do it, according to the system of initiation, through a series of
discipline, into all the schools and mysteries of that time and country.
The first public reference to a stated existence of the Books of the Old
Testament is the reign of Ptolomy Philadelphus. Egypt appears to have
been the only country in which it can be said that a series of Kings
gave encouragement to science, which appears, as far as history is
witness, to have brought in the Augustan era. It became, as far as
wars and tumults would permit, fashionable so to do, until superstition
overwhelmed it and usurped all its names, leading on to the dark ages of
what has been since mis-called the Christian era. Cultivation of science
is the restorative power, and the only public or private act that
confers true dignity on man. This is the only remedy for the disorder
of the Church; and I have introduced this historical view of the Jewish
name, to show how flimsy is that web of superstition which has been
woven in the existing Church on the foundation of a supposed national
history and origin of the Jews. Truth nowhere finds opposition in fact,
date, or principle: error is opposed by endless proofs of the kind.
It remains now only that I give an outline of the historical defects of
the present received view of the mystery of the Christian Religion, and
then draw to a conclusion.
No record extant, or referred to, that, having been written in the first
century, has mentioned the human existence of an individual of the name
of Jesus Christ.
A passage now in Josephus is a declared interpolation, inasmuch as it
was first known to the world in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius,
written in the fourth century, after Photius and Origen, of the third
century, had written, that Josephus had not made mention of Jesus
Christ.
In the writings of Philo Judæus, an Alexandrian Jew of the first
century, much is said about the Logos, in carrying out the philosophy of
Plato; but not a word about Jesus Christ.
Pliny the younger, in his letter to the Emperor Trajan, written from
Bythinia between the years 106 and 112, is the first to mention the name
of Christ. This mention is as of a God and not as of a man: no reference
is made to Judea or to Jews; and the worshippers of this God he
describes under the name of Christians, and as having long existed as a
sect in that province. He writes as if he had heard nothing of the sect
at Rome, and describes their worship as an excessive superstition.
The passage in Tacitus is rejected, as not noticed by Eusebius or
any one before the fifteenth century; that it was found in a copy by
Johannes de Spire at Venice.
This brings us to Justin Martyr, who can only be considered a Christian
of the Platonic order, making no reference to Gospels or Epistles.
Thence we come to St. Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, who has very much
the appearance of a Druidical Bishop rather than as a newly-appointed
Christian Bishop. Irenæus mentions the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John, and gives the reason why there should be four; as because
there are four seasons in the year. He has many other allegorical
extravagancies in his writings, and is not deemed the most respectable
of the Fathers of the present Church.
In the third century, and toward the latter part of that century, near
three hundred years after the supposed birth of the man Jesus Christ, we
have a recognition of all the Books in the New Testament, which received
the stamp of the authority of a Council of Bishops, as a selection from
many similar and dissimilar books under similar titles, in the fourth
century; but whether the revelation of the mystery was then understood
by the Bishops does not appear.
The Epistles of the New Testament have no dates nor reference to any
persons who were known to have lived at any particular time. They
are not supported by, nor do they support, the Gospels. The idea of
allegorism prevailed in the third century.
The Christian era was not reduced to chronology until the sixth century;
and that chronology was very little used or referred to until the tenth,
that the era of the Hegira of Mahomet had come much into use. The real
struggle of the present Christian Church was not with the Pagan but with
the Mahometan Religion, and they are near a balance of numerical power
to this day. A battle in France, in the reign of Charles Martel, checked
the progress of the Mahometans, and saved the entire overthrow of the
mysterious Christian Church on the continent of Europe. There was a much
greater similarity between the Pagan and the Christian, than between the
Christian and the Mahometan Religion.
I have no objection to the religion of the Jew or the Christian, that is
founded on the spiritual reading of the Bible. Mahometanism is superior
to both, while founded on the reading of the letter. The restoration of
the Jews to original character and the millennium of the Christians is
only to be brought about by the spiritual reading, which will lead to
a devotion to science. The future Temple of the New Jerusalem must be a
Temple devoted to the promulgation of truth and all sciences, and such
must be the Church of Rome, and such our English Church, under any real
state of reformation.
The practical part of my proposition for a Reform in the Church, is,
that all indefensible superstition or mystery be banished or explained,
that it be made the best possible general school for the people, to
which the knowledge of the time is equal; that the people being the
Church, and the Ministers not being the Church, the property of the
Church in each parish shall be managed by the parishioners as their
property, and the best provision be made with that property, including
tithes, that can be made for all the physical and moral necessities of
the people. The property must be put under some authority, cannot be
allowed to remain as it is, cannot be well put under extra parochial
authority; but may be well and honestly left to parochial management, as
the property of the parish.
As our Institutions were all so first arranged for this purpose, so it
will be found, that every thing emanating will fall back easily into
its natural, moral, and original use. I cannot see the least difficulty,
beyond the dishonesty and reluctance to yield of existing spirit. Such
as are so weak in mind as to desire the present Church ceremony, may
have it as long as they like, so as they do not exclude more useful
business. I repeat, that, if the Bishops and Clergy be wise, they will
take this advice: if they do not, they will very soon be where their
predecessors were in the seventeenth century, not to be restored again.
I flatter myself, that, in this letter, I have produced a pamphlet that
will not be dead-born. As far as possible, or as clearness of purpose
would permit, I have endeavoured to avoid the use of offensive language.
Whatever the world may think of me, I know nothing more of myself, than
that of having a passion to be useful, to my country and fellow-men
generally, in and previous to the critical coming time of change. It is
not now to be mistaken as near. It is near, and very near. The present
system may be dragged on through several years; but no one can insure it
a twelve months' existence. I know that all bad passions are allied
to ignorance, and I desire to see all those passions softened down by
knowledge. I am sure that the new man, the spiritual man, the good and
moral man, must be created by knowledge and independent individuality
of action; and as I prefer (the Government having the choice) a moral to
any other revolution, brought about by words rather than by harder and
harsher weapons, I feel, that I have but performed a social, a civil,
and a religious duty, in presenting this letter to your notice. That it
may be read, marked, learned and inwardly digested, is the prayer of
Your humble Servant,
And prisoner in the business of Church Reform,
RICHARD CARLILE.
Giltspur Street Compter,
January 29,1835.
TENTH YEAR OF IMPRISONMENT.