date

18 Aug. 1814 Logic 5
18 Aug. 1814

Logic

5

Ch. Differentia

Church

On the score of beauty, admiration; on the score of tenderness and kindness and tenderness, love; on the score of fitness for domestic management and rule, respect: these affections are in use to find their joint object in the character or relation designated by the word mother. Admiration, love, and respect, on the one part; all these are on the other part so many instruments of governance. The servants of the subject many had their assemblies for acting in such their capacity, and securing to themselves the faculty of continuing so to do. Of these assemblies, the members were some young, some middle-aged, some elderly men. Upon contemplating themselves altogether in the mirror of rhetoric, it was found that all these males put together was composed one beautiful female, the worthy object of the associated affections of admiration, love, and respect - the Holy Mother Church.

Besides this, this holy female was seen to possess a still greater quantity of holiness, than could have entered into the composition of the aggregate mass of holiness composed of the separate holinesses of the several holy males of which she was composed, had they not, in the above-mentioned holy place been thus assembled and met together. By ordinances issued by this holy female, a greater and surer measure of admiration, respect, and consequent obedience, was obtained than would have been obtained by the assembly in its plain and original character of an assembly of males, notwithstanding all their holiness.

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    By this consolidation /combination/ thus happily accomplished, an effect no less felicitous and convenient than it was holy, was produced; in the holy compound, while all the perfections of which both sexes are susceptible were found united, all imperfection, as if by chemical precipitation, were found to have been excluded. The holy men might, notwithstanding their holiness, have remained fallible; the Holy Mother was found to be infallible. Her title to implicit confidence, and its naturally inseparable consequence implicit obedience, became at once placed upon the firmest ground, and raised to the highest pitch.

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    4. From designating first the act of calling together an assembly, then the assembly composed of all persons, and no other than all persons, actually assembled together at a particular /one and the same/ time in a particular place, and then all the persons who were regarded as entitled so to assemble at that place, it came also to be employed to designate the place itself at or in which such assembly was wont to be held: the place consisting of the soil, the portion of the earth's surface, on which, for containing and protecting the assembly from the occasional injuries of the weather a building was erected, and such building itself when erected.

    Such as above being the purpose for which the sort of building in question was erected, viz. the paying homage to God, God, although present at all times in all places, was regarded as being in a more particular manner present at and in all places of this sort; attentive to whatsoever was passing at all other places, but still more attentive to whatsoever was passing in these places.

    Being thus as it were the dwelling-places of God, these places became to the members of the association objects of particular awe and reverence, of a mixture of respect and terror - they became, in one word, holy; whereupon, by an easy and insensible transition, this mixture of respect and terror came to extend itself to, upon, and to the benefit of, the class of persons in whose hands was reposed the management of whatsoever was done in these holy places: holy functions made holy places, holy places and holy functions made holy persons.

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    When an edifice of the holy class has been erected and duly consecrated proportioned to the holiness, the sanctity, the sacredness bestowed upon it in and by its consecration, is the enormity of any offence by which it has been profaned and it sanctity violated.

    When again an edifice of the holy class has been erected and duly consecrated, the more sumptuous, the more magnificent, the more lofty, the more admirable, the more venerable the structure, the greater the calamity, the wider the ruin, the more intense the shock arising from its being subverted, the more intolerable the apprehension of the danger of its being subverted: the more intense and implacable the indignation excited towards and pointed against all persons regarded or considered as capable of being the authors or promoters of so shocking a catastrophe.

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