her discipline, or her rites. She did so, when she shook off the papal supremacy in the reign of Henry the VIIIth, which was an act of the body of the English church, as well as of the state (I don't enquire how obtained). She did so, when she twice changed the liturgy in the reign of King Edward, when she then established articles, which were themselves a variation from former professions. She did so, when she cut off three articles from her original 42, and reduced them to the present 39; and she certainly would not lose her corporate identity, nor subvert her fundamental principles, though she were to leave ten of the 39, which remain, out of any future confession of her faith. She would limit her corporate powers, on the contrary, and she would oppose her fundamental principles, if she were to deny herself the prudential exercise of such capacity of reformation. This therefore can be no objection to your receiving the petition.

In the next place, Sir, I am clear, that the act of union, reciting and ratifying one Scotch and one English act of parliament, has not rendered any change whatsoever in our church impossible, but by a dissolution of the union between the two kingdoms.

The honourable gentleman, who has last touched upon that point, has not gone quite so far as the gentlemen who first insisted upon it. However, as none of them wholly abandon that post, it will not be safe to leave it behind me unattacked. I believe no one will wish their interpretation of that act to be considered as authentick. What shall we think of the wisdom (to say nothing of the competence) of that legislature, which should ordain to itself such a fundamental law at its outset, as to disable itself from executing its own functions; which should prevent it from making any further laws, however wanted, and that too on the most interesting subject that belongs to human society, and where she most frequently wants its interposition; which should fix those fundamental laws, that are for ever to prevent it from adapting itself to its opinions, however clear, or to its own necessities, however urgent? Such an act, Mr. Speaker, would for ever put the church out of its own power; it certainly would put it far above the state, and erect it into that species of independency, which it has been the great principle of our policy to prevent.

The act never meant, I am sure, any such unnatural restraint on the joint legislature it was then forming. History shews us what it meant, and all that it could mean with any degree of

common sense.

In the reign of Charles the First a violent and illconsidered attempt was made, unjustly, to establish the platform of the government, and the rites of the church of England, in Scotland, contrary to the genius and desires of far the majority of that nation. This usurpation excited a most mutinous spirit in that country. It produced that shocking fanatical covenant (I mean the covenant of 36) for forcing their ideas of religion on

England, and indeed on all mankind. This became the occasion, at length, of other covenants, and of a Scotch army marching into England to fulfil them; and the parliament of England (for its own purposes) adopted their scheme, took their last covenant, and destroyed the church of England. The parliament, in their ordinance of 1643, expressly assign their desire of conforming to the church of Scotland as a motive for their alteration.

To prevent such violent enterprises on the one side or on the other, since each church was going to be disarmed of a legislature wholly and peculiarly affected to it, and lest this new uniformity in the state should be urged as a reason and ground of ecclesiastical uniformity, the act of union provided, that presbytery should continue the Scotch, as episcopacy the English, establishment, and that this separate and mutually independent church-government was to be considered as a part of the union, without aiming at putting the regulation within each church out of its own. power, without putting both churches out of the power of the state. It could not mean to forbid us to set any thing ecclesiastical in order, but at the expence of tearing up all foundations, and forfeiting the inestimable benefits (for inestimable they are) which we derive from the happy union of the two kingdoms. To suppose otherwise is to suppose, that the act intended we could not meddle at all with the church, but we must as a preliminary destroy the state.

Well then, Sir, this is, I hope, satisfactory. The act of union does not stand in our way: but, Sir, gentlemen think we are not competent to the reformation desired, chiefly from our want of theological learning. If we were the legal assembly *

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If ever there was any thing, to which from reason, nature, habit, and principle, I am totally averse, it is persecution for conscientious difference in opinion. If these gentlemen complained justly of any compulsion upon them on that article, I would hardly wait for their petitions; as soon as I knew the evil I would haste to the cure; I would even run before their complaints.

I will not enter into the abstract merits of our articles and liturgy-perhaps there are some things in them, which one would wish had not been there. They are not without the marks and characters of human frailty.

But it is not human frailty and imperfection, and even a considerable degree of them, that becomes a ground for your alteration; for by no alteration will you get rid of those errours, however you may delight yourselves in varying to infinity the fashion of them. But the ground for a legislative alteration of a legal establishment is this, and this only; that you find the inclinations of the majority of the people concurring with your own sense of the intolerable nature of the abuse, are in favour of a change.

If this be the case in the present instance, certainly you ought to make the alteration that is pro

This business appears in two points of view. 1st. Whether it is a matter of grievance. 2d. Whether it is within our province to redress it with propriety and prudence. Whether it comes properly before us on a petition upon matter of grievance, I would not enquire too curiously. I know, technically speaking, that nothing agreeable to law can be considered as a grievance. But an over-attention to the rules of any act does sometimes defeat the ends of it, and I think it does so in this parliamentary act, as much at least as in any other. I know many gentlemen think, that the very essence of liberty consists in being governed according to law; as if grievances had nothing real and intrinsick; but I cannot be of that opinion. Grievances may subsist by law. Nay, I do not know whether any grievance can be considered as intolerable until it is established and sanctified by law. If the act of toleration were not perfect, if there were a complaint of it, I would gladly consent to amend it. But when I heard a complaint of a pressure on religious liberty, to my astonishment I find, that there was no complaint whatsoever of the insufficiency of the act of King William, nor any attempt to make it more sufficient. The matter therefore does not concern toleration, but establishment; and it is not the rights of private conscience that are in question, but the propriety of the terms, which are proposed by law as a title to publick emoluments; so that the complaint is not, that there is not toleration of diversity in opinion, but that diversity in opinion is not rewarded by bishopricks, rectories, and collegiate stalls. When gentlemen complain of the subscription as matter of grievance, the complaint arises from confounding private judgment, whose rights are anteriour to law, and the qualifications, which the law creates for its own magistracies, whether civil or religious. To take away from men their lives, their liberty, or their property, those things, for the protection of which society was introduced, is great hardship and intolerable tyranny; but to annex any condition you please to benefits, artificially created, is the most just, natural, and proper thing in the world. When e novo you form an arbitrary benefit, an advantage, pre-eminence, or emolument, not by nature, but institution, you order and modify it with all the power of a creator over his creature. Such benefits of institution are royalty, nobility, priesthood; all of which you may limit to birth; you might prescribe even shape and stature. The Jewish priesthood was hereditary. Founders' kinsmen have a preference in the election of Fellows in many colleges of our

By contending for liberty in the candidate for orders, you take away the liberty of the elector, which is the people; that is, the state. If they can choose, they may assign a reason for their choice; if they can assign a reason, they may do it in writing, and prescribe it as a condition; they may transfer their authority to their representatives, and enable them to exercise the same. In all human institutions a great part, almost all regulations, are made from the mere necessity of the case, let the theoretical merits of the question be what they will. For nothing happened at the Reformation, but what will happen in all such revolutions. When tyranny is extreme, and abuses of government intolerable, men resort to the rights of nature to shake it off. When they have done so, the very same principle of necessity of human affairs, to establish some other authority, which shall preserve the order of this new institution, must be obeyed, until they grow intolerable; and you shall not be suffered to plead original liberty against such an institution. See Holland, Switzerland.

If you will have religion publickly practised and publickly taught, you must have a power to say what that religion will be, which you will protect and encourage; and to distinguish it by such marks and characteristicks, as you in your wisdom shall think fit. As I said before, your determination may be unwise in this as in other matters, but it cannot be unjust, hard, or oppressive, or contrary to the liberty of any man, or in the least degree exceeding your province.

It is therefore as a grievance fairly none at all, nothing but what is essential not only to the order, but to the liberty, of the whole community.

The petitioners are so sensible of the force of these arguments, that they do admit of one subscription, that is, to the Scripture. I shall not consider how forcibly this argument militates with their whole principle against subscription as an usurpation on the rights of Providence: I content myself with submitting to the consideration of the house, that, if that rule were once established, it must have some authority to enforce the obedience; because you well know, a law without a sanction will be ridiculous. Somebody must sit in judgment on his conformity; he must judge on the charge; if he judges, he must ordain execution. These things are necessary consequences one of the other; and then this judgment is an equal and a superiour violation of private judgment; the right of private judgment is violated in a much greater degree than it can be by any previous subscription. You come round again to subscription, as the best and easiest method; men must judge of his doctrine, and judge definitively; so that either his test is nugatory, or men must first or last prescribe his publick interpretation of it.

If the church be, as Mr. Locke defines it, a

voluntary society, &c. then it is essential to this voluntary society to exclude from her voluntary society any member she thinks fit, or to oppose the entrance of any upon such conditions as she thinks proper. For otherwise it would be a voluntary society acting contrary to her will, which is a contradiction in terms.-And this is Mr. Locke's opinion, the advocate for the largest scheme of ecclesiastical and civil toleration to protestants (for to papists he allows no toleration at all).

They dispute only the extent of the subscription; they therefore tacitly admit the equity of the principle itself. Here they do not resort to the original rights of nature, because it is manifest, that those rights give as large a power of controverting every part of Scripture, or even the authority of the whole, as they do to the controverting any articles whatsoever. When a man requires you to sign an assent to Scripture, he requires you to assent to a doctrine as contrary to your natural understanding, and to your rights of free enquiry, as those, who require your conformity to any one article whatsoever.

The subscription to Scripture is the most astonishing idea I ever heard, and will amount to just nothing at all. Gentlemen so acute have not, that I have heard, ever thought of answering a plain obvious question-What is that Scripture, to which they are content to subscribe? They do not think, that a book becomes of divine authority because it is bound in blue morocco, and is printed by John Basket and his assigns. The Bible is a vast collection of different treatises; a man, who holds the divine authority of one, may consider the other as merely human. What is his canon? The Jewish-St. Jerom's--that of the 39 articles-Luther's? There are some who reject the Canticles, others six of the Epistles-the Apocalypse has been suspected even as heretical, and was doubted of for many ages, and by many great

men. As these narrow the canon, others have enlarged it by admitting St. Barnabas's Epistles, the Apostolick Constitutions, to say nothing of many other Gospels. Therefore to ascertain Scripture you must have one article more; and you must define what that Scripture is, which you mean to teach. There are, I believe, very few, who, when Scripture is so ascertained, do not see the absolute necessity of knowing what general doctrine a man draws from it, before he is sent down authorized by the state to teach it as pure doctrine, and receive a tenth of the produce of our lands.

The Scripture is no one summary of doctrines regularly digested, in which a man could not mistake his way; it is a most venerable, but most multifarious, collection of the records of the divine economy; a collection of an infinite variety of Cosmogony, Theology, History, Prophecy, Psalmody, Morality, Apologue, Allegory, Legislation, Ethicks, carried through different books, by different authors, at different ages, for different ends and purposes.

It is necessary to sort out what is intended for example, what only as narrative, what to be understood literally, what figuratively, where one precept is to be controlled and modified by another, what is used directly, and what only as an argument ad hominem,-what is temporary, and what of perpetual obligation,-what appropriated to one state, and to one set of men, and what the general duty of all Christians. If we do not get some security for this, we not only permit, but we actually pay for, all the dangerous fanaticism, which can be produced to corrupt our people, and to derange the publick worship of the country. We owe the best we can (not infallibility, but prudence) to the subject, first sound doctrine, then ability to use it.

I ASSURE you, Sir, that the honourable gentle- | man, who spoke last but one, need not be in the least fear, that I should make a war of particles upon his opinion, whether the church of England

This speech is given partly from the manuscript papers of Mr. Burke, and partly from a very imperfect short-hand note taken at the time by a member of the house of commons.

This bill was opposed by petitions from several congregations calling themselves "Protestant Dissenters;" who appear to

should, would, or ought to be alarmed. I am very clear, that this house has no one reason in the world to think she is alarmed by the bill brought before you. It is something extraor

have been principally composed of the people, who are generally known under the denomination of " Methodists;" and particularly by a petition from a congregation of that description, residing in the town of Chatham.