Church Reform The Only Means to That End, Stated in a Letter to Sir Robert Peel, Bart., First Lord of the Treasury — Key Ideas to Explore

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Authors: Carlile, Richard, 1790-1843 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2012 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Rationalism; Bible -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Church and state -- Church of England Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 27,776

Reading time 121 min

Text sections 3

The catalog record for Church Reform The Only Means to That End, Stated in a Letter to Sir Robert Peel, Bart., First Lord of the Treasury — Key Ideas to Explore provides practical reading context through 27,776 words, 2 hr 1 min estimated reading time, and 3 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 28.6 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Rationalism,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #40211

Richard Carlile's 1833 open letter to Sir Robert Peel argues for radical Church reform, framing Christianity as a rational revelation opposed to mystery and superstition. The work pairs a preface of correspondence with the Bishop of London with a direct appeal to Peel, using a structure that moves from polite request to forceful indictment of clerical ignorance and state complicity.

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File: pg40211

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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.

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Richard Carlile's Church Reform opens not with a treatise but with a correspondence: a polite request for an interview with the Bishop of London, met with a cautious reply preferring written communication. This epistolary frame establishes the work's central tension—a reformer seeking dialogue with authority, only to be directed into monologue. The letter to Sir Robert Peel that follows is anything but deferential. Carlile shifts from courteous petitioner to sharp critic, accusing the clergy of fostering 'studied ignorance' and the state of perpetuating 'the mystery' rather than the revelation he equates with true Christianity.

The Epistolary Frame as Argumentative Strategy

The preface, containing Carlile's exchange with the Bishop of London, is more than a credential. It enacts the very dynamic Carlile will later condemn: the institutional church's refusal to engage directly with dissent. The Bishop's reply—'I shall be ready to receive… any communication… in writing; as being… a more convenient method'—is a bureaucratic deflection. Carlile, in turn, uses this rejection to position himself as a 'scattered sheep' seeking a 'good shepherd,' a biblical appeal that subtly indicts the Bishop for failing to tend his flock. This opening correspondence thus serves as a microcosm of the larger argument: the church, by avoiding personal conference, reveals its fear of reason and reform.

Recurring Images of Light and Darkness

Throughout the letter, Carlile contrasts 'the mystery' with 'the revelation,' a binary that structures his critique. He describes centuries of 'dark ages of ignorance and superstition' and calls the unrevealed mystery 'the curse and moral devil of the human race.' The antidote is knowledge: 'GET KNOWLEDGE!' he exhorts, imagining church porticos inscribed with 'KNOW THYSELF, AND ENTER HERE TO GET KNOWLEDGE.' This image recurs as a counterpoint to the present reality of 'studied ignorance' and 'suppression of knowledge.' Carlile's rhetoric moves between apocalyptic condemnation—the reign of 'Anti-Christianity'—and utopian vision, where ministers become teachers and communicants find friends in their clergy.

Direct Address and the Shifting Target

Carlile's letter is addressed to Sir Robert Peel, but his addressee shifts. Early on, he speaks of 'your Lordship' in the correspondence, then turns to 'you' as Peel, the Conservative leader. He challenges Peel directly: 'Your boast is now that of being chief or leader of the CONSERVATIVES. This is not what the nation wants.' The tone escalates from reasoned argument to personal indictment: 'You certainly have seen none of them in practice; for your scholarship and administration have been full of error and wickedness.' Yet Carlile also offers Peel a role: 'I invite you to take the task in your hands.' This oscillation between confrontation and invitation creates a rhetorical rhythm, pushing the reader to consider both the urgency of reform and the possibility of redemption through action.

The Prisoner's Perspective and the Market of Ideas

Carlile writes from a position of legal vulnerability—he references having been subjected to 'prison-discipline' and offers to 'remain in prison' if reform is set in motion. This personal stake lends weight to his argument. He frames his own writings as 'knowledge thrown into the market' that 'you cannot withdraw from the market of human intellect.' The market metaphor is striking: knowledge is a commodity that, once released, cannot be suppressed. Carlile presents himself as a supplier of intellectual goods that the people will eventually acquire, regardless of state or church opposition. This economic language grounds his radicalism in a practical, almost entrepreneurial vision of reform driven by public demand.

Carlile's Church Reform is best read as a performance of dissent—a document that enacts the very confrontation it advocates. The reader should attend to the shifts in tone, from the measured preface to the fiery letter, and to the recurring imagery of light versus darkness, knowledge versus mystery. The work's structure, moving from polite request to direct challenge, mirrors Carlile's argument that reform must begin with honest dialogue, even when that dialogue is refused.

Fifty years before I ever held my own worn copy of Richard Carlile’s letters, he was already pleading with Peel for a Christianity stripped of mystery—a strange, lonely rationalism. It made me think of quieter struggles in Sermons of the Rev. Francis A. Baker, Priest of the Congregation of St. Paul With a Memoir of His Life — Themes and Context, where faith feels less like argument and more like wearing down a stone. Both books, somehow, ache for something true.