On Thursday, the Right Honourable James Stansfeld, in laying the
corner-stone of a new Unitarian Chapel at Halifax (the borough for which he sits), took the opportunity of speaking with warns praise of the generous faith felt by the Presbyterians of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, in the right of the people of the future to determine the character of their own faith. They "combined in a most remarkable degree, positive religious faith,:--I may say dogmatic faith,—with the belief and conviction that however positive their faith might be, it was not for them to attempt by creeds, or formularies, or tests, to narrow, to crib, to confine the religious convictions of their fellow-men or of their successors." Their ancestors had. simply dedicated the Church, "for the exercise and performance of religious worship, and for the service of Almighty God ;" and Mr. Stansfeld dedicated the new chapel in the same words to the same broad purposes, on which he remarked that it was impossible to improve. Possibly. But the Positivists would think it very possible to improve on such a formula, and would declare that it did narrow, crib, and confine the convictions of men who might wish, with them, to worship not God, but Humanity. As far as we can see, Mr. Stansfeld's principle should go to declaring that the majority of those at any one time subscribing to keep up any chapel, should have power to determine the character of its religious worship, or even that it should be used for other than religious uses, if it so pleased them. If it is right to limit the trust of such a building to "the service of Almighty God," it can hardly be wrong to limit it to the service of God as revealed in Christ. In fact, the exact permissive area of the religious trust becomes a mere question of judgment.
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