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DISSENTERS. Penal Laws.
They are in a great error, who seeing the words twenty
Pound & £100 & so many months imprisonment,
think that look upon the punishment for dissenting as just
so much as being just & no more. It is absolute for this grievous alternative,
beggary or perpetual imprisonment. It
is absolute proscription: as much so as any thing
can be, where torture is not used inflicted nor life
destroy'd. x p.4
[He who has travelled with too many horses one day may travel the next with fewer.] He who has made his cloth wrong one time, may make it right another
Here it is, as well in the literal sense of the bondage, as in the historical sense given to it by the inventors is infinite, will he recant the Cut-throat (on whom no one can lay hands, to seize him best at the hazard of life) has his head not at half the price, which Christian Bishops are content shall be gained by him in full security who will sacrifice their fellow Christians minister to their wrath. Was there any one who that proposed the reward should be taken away? Not one. Was there any one who even proposed it should be suspended, untill any danger should accrue to that peace, for the sake of which it is pretended to be continued?
In all other offences, when the fine is once paid, wch
the Law expresses, all is over at an end. — The numbers on
the paper are the measure of the offenders' suffering,
& it is his own folly if it be ever more. — Him He who had
smuggled once & has smarted for it, [may make himself easy].no one forces him to smuggle again.
2 The same consistence which placed him in this fatal dangerous
career
station compells him to persevere. 1 Let his punishment
have been multiplied ever so often, he has it
still to begin go through again.
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Of all artifices the most disingenuous, the most
ill-founded, but perhaps the most successful,
is that of confounding these mens cause with the
cause of deism.
What would the Deists be the gainers by the abolition
of this penal System punishment? it touches not them: unless to
Deism belongs what the men of Orthodoxy seem to
impute to it, & for which they hate it, a tender
& zealous regard for the rights of human Nature,
that spirit of universal charity, which
it is the best elogium praise of Christianity [to] that
ii inculcates. Church Tyranny exposed displayed in the sacrifice of the Dissenters By an M.A. of the University of Oxon.
To the great discomfiture of men of orthodoxy
he has long enjoyed, & God grant he may ever enjoy, that
peace & liberty, as to his devotion which Christians as yet sigh after in vain. He is at his ease nor has anything left as to what regards himself to wish for.
Punishment is denounced against him them, who without
having subscribed certain declarations
What is that to him? His Church is his Closet
his Liturgy the extemporaneous effusions of the heart
Identifier: | JB/073/019/001 "JB/" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 73.
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