e
Holy Catholic Church to spiritual supremacy: but it will better accord
with our plan to take that claim into consideration while treating of
the temporary institutions of Christianity.

From the essential principles of the Gospel we derive our belief that
Christianity, is not designed for any union, permanent or temporary,
with worldly power and grandeur; that it is incapable of such a
connexion; being injured instead of confirmed by the support of temporal
authority, and impaired instead of adorned by the adjuncts of worldly
pomp. This principle is asserted in words by every Christian Church in
existence; but violated, in fact, by almost as many. Christianity is
acknowledged to be a religion of poverty of spirit, of self-denial, of
looseness from the world and its possessions. If this principle were
carried out into each individual case, it is plain that the pomp and
ambition which have despoiled the Gospel of its purity could no longer
exist. It is remarkable that this poverty and self-denial are most
insisted on in those Churches where the temporal power and luxury are
the most excessive. We hear of them above all from Catholics, whose
popes, cardinals, and bishops have, in every age, exceeded all temporal
princes in the enjoyment of splendor and luxury. We hear of them from
the Church of England, whose superior officers revel in unbounded
wealth, and especially prize the connexion with the State which their
office occasions. While we Unitarians, who hold that Christianity is of
a purely spiritual nature, and therefore dishonored by the pretended
support of powers inferior to its own, insist much less earnestly than
the Catholic Church on the duty of self-mortification and voluntary
poverty. Our Church, were it as extensive as the Catholic, would contain
no ecclesiastical princes, and no friars; no potentates clothed in
purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day from the revenues
of the Church, and no believers whose piety is testified by a vow of
poverty. We believe that our religion ought to be exerted in controling
the passions, exalting the desires, and equalizing the affections, not
so much by regulating the external manifestations of those passions and
desires, as by influencing the heart. Self-denial is taught much better
by inspiring the love of our neighbor, than by the prohibition of
innocent comforts and pleasures. Spirituality is much better taught by
making spiritual things the objects of s