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ceive I have lately seen some indication of a disposition perfectly similar to the old one; that is, a disposition to carry the imputation of crimes from persons to descriptions, and wholly to alter the character and quality of the offences themselves.

This universal exclusion seems to me a serious evil-because many collateral oppressions, besides what I have just now stated, have arisen from it. In things of this nature, it would not be either easy or proper to quote chapter and verse; but I have great reason to believe, particularly since the octennial act, that several have refused at all to let their lands to Roman catholicks; because it would so far disable them from promoting such interests in counties as they were inclined to favour. They who consider also the state of all sorts of tradesmen, shopkeepers, and particularly publicans, in towns, must soon discern the disadvantages under which those labour who have no votes. It cannot be otherwise, whilst the spirit of elections, and the tendencies of human nature, continue as they are. If property be artificially separated from franchise, the franchise must in some way or other, and in some proportion, naturally attract property to it. Many are the collateral disadvantages amongst a privileged people, which must attend on those who have no privileges.

Among the rich each individual, with or without a franchise, is of importance; the poor and the middling are no otherwise so, than as they obtain some collective capacity and can be aggregated to some corps. If legal ways are not found, illegal will be resorted to; and seditious clubs and confederacies, such as no man living holds in greater horrour than I do, will grow and flourish in spite, I am afraid, of any thing which can be done to prevent the evil. Lawful enjoyment is the surest method to prevent unlawful gratification. Where there is property, there will be less theft; where there is marriage, there will always be less fornication.

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upon others, even under penalties and incapacities
-No! No! This never could have been done even
by reasonable atheists. They who think religion
of no importance to the state, have abandoned it
to the conscience, or caprice, of the individual;
they make no provision for it whatsoever, but
leave every club to make, or not, a voluntary con-
tribution towards its support, according to their
fancies. This would be consistent. The other
always appeared to me to be a monster of contra-
diction and absurdity. It was for that reason, that,
some years ago, I strenuously opposed the clergy
who petitioned, to the number of about three
hundred, to be freed from the subscription to the
thirty-nine articles, without proposing to substitute
any other in their place. There never has been a
religion of the state, (the few years of the parlia-
ment only excepted,) but that of the episcopal
church of England; the episcopal church of Eng-
land, before the Reformation, connected with the
see of Rome, since then, disconnected and protest-
ing against some of her doctrines, and against the
whole of her authority, as binding in our national
church: nor did the fundamental laws of this king-
dom (in Ireland it has been the same) ever know,
at any period, any other church as an object of
establishment; or in that light, any other protest-
ant religion. Nay our protestant toleration itself
at the Revolution, and until within a few years, re-
quired a signature of thirty-six, and a part of the
thirty-seventh, out of the thirty-nine articles. So
little idea had they at the Revolution of establish-
ing protestantism indefinitely, that they did not
indefinitely tolerate it under that name.
I do not
mean to praise that strictness, where nothing more
than merely religious toleration is concerned.
Toleration, being a part of moral and political pru-
dence, ought to be tender and large. A tolerant
government ought not to be too scrupulous in its
investigations; but may bear without blame, not
only very ill-grounded doctrines, but even many
things that are positively vices, where they are
adulta et prævalida. The good of the common-
wealth is the rule which rides over the rest; and
to this every other must completely submit.

I have said enough of the question of state, as it affects the people merely as such. But it is complicated with a political question relative to religion, to which it is very necessary I should say something; because the term protestant, which you ap- The church of Scotland knows as little of proply, is too general for the conclusions which one of testantism undefined, as the church of England and your accurate understanding would wish to draw Ireland do. She has by the articles of union secured from it; and because a great deal of argument to herself the perpetual establishment of the Conwill depend on the use that is made of that term.fession of Faith, and the Presbyterian church goIt is not a fundamental part of the settlement at the Revolution, that the state should be protestant without any qualification of the term. With a qualification it is unquestionably true; not in all its latitude. With the qualification, it was true before the Revolution. Our predecessors in legislation were not so irrational (not to say impious) as to form an operose ecclesiastical establishment, and even to render the state itself in some degree subservient to it, when their religion (if such it might be called) was nothing but a mere negation of some other -without any positive idea either of doctrine, discipline, worship, or morals, in the scheme which they professed themselves, and which they imposed

vernment. In England, even during the troubled interregnum, it was not thought fit to establish a negative religion; but the parliament settled the presbyterian, as the church discipline; the Directory, as the rule of publick worship; and the Westminster catechism, as the institute of faith. This is to shew, that at no time was the protestant religion, undefined, established here or any where else, as I believe. I am sure that when the three religions were established in Germany, they were expressly characterised and declared to be the Evangelick, the Reformed, and the Catholick; each of which has its confession of faith and its settled discipline; so that you always may know the best and

the worst of them, to enable you to make the most of what is good, and to correct or to qualify, or to guard against whatever may seem evil or dangerous.

As to the coronation oath, to which you allude, as opposite to admitting a Roman catholick to the use of any franchise whatsoever, I cannot think that the king would be perjured if he gave his assent to any regulation which parliament might think fit to make with regard to that affair. The king is bound by law, as clearly specified in several acts of parliament, to be in communion with the church of England. It is a part of the tenure by which he holds his crown; and though no provision was made till the Revolution, which could be called positive and valid in law, to ascertain this great principle, I have always considered it as in fact fundamental, that the king of England should be of the christian religion, according to the national legal church for the time being. I conceive it was so before the Reformation. Since the Reformation it became doubly necessary; because the king is the head of that church; in some sort an ecclesiastical person; and it would be incongruous and absurd, to have the head of the church of one faith, and the members of another. The king may inherit the crown as a protestant, but he cannot hold it, according to law, without being a protestant of the church of England.

Before we take it for granted, that the king is bound by his coronation oath not to admit any of his catholick subjects to the rights and liberties, which ought to belong to them as Englishmen, (not as religionists,) or to settle the conditions or proportions of such admission by an act of parliament, I wish you to place before your eyes that oath itself, as it is settled in the act of William and Mary.

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Will you to the utmost of your power maintain "The laws of God, the true profession of the gospel-and the protestant reformed religion as "it is established by law. And will you preserve unto bishops and clergy, and the churches "committed to their charge, all such rights "and privileges as by law do, or shall appertain "to them, or any of them.-All this I promise "to do."

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Here are the coronation engagements of the king. In them I do not find one word to preclude his majesty from consenting to any arrangement which parliament may make with regard to the civil privileges of any part of his subjects.

protestant church of England, in the two king-
doms, in which it is established by law. First,
the king swears he will maintain, to the utmost of
his power,
"the laws of God." I suppose it means
the natural moral laws. Secondly, he swears to
maintain "the true profession of the gospel." By
which I suppose is understood affirmatively the
christian religion.-Thirdly, that he will maintain
"the protestant reformed religion." This leaves
me no power of supposition or conjecture; for
that protestant reformed religion is defined and
described by the subsequent words, “established
by law," and in this instance to define it beyond
all possibility of doubt, he "swears to maintain
"the bishops and clergy, and the churches com-
"mitted to their charge," in their rights present
and future.

The oath as effectually prevents the king from doing any thing to the prejudice of the church in favour of sectaries, Jews, Mahometans, or plain avowed infidels; as if he should do the same thing in favour of the catholicks. You will see, that it is the same protestant church, so described, that the king is to maintain and communicate with, according to the act of settlement of the 12th and 13th of William III. The act of the 5th of Anne, made in prospect of the Union, is entitled, “An "act for securing the church of England as by law "established." It meant to guard the church implicitly against any other mode of protestant religion which might creep in by means of the Union. It proves beyond all doubt, that the legislature did not mean to guard the church on one part only, and to leave it defenceless and exposed upon every other. This church, in that act, is declared to be "fundamental and essential" for ever, in the constitution of the united kingdom, so far as England is concerned; and I suppose as the law stands, even since the independence, it is so in Ireland.

All this shews, that the religion which the king is bound to maintain has a positive part in it as well as a negative; and that the positive part of it (in which we are in perfect agreement with the catholicks and with the church of Scotland) is infinitely the most valuable and essential. Such an agreement we had with protestant dissenters in England, of those descriptions who came under the toleration act of King William and Queen Mary; an act coeval with the Revolution; and which ought, on the principles of the gentlemen who oppose the relief to the catholicks, to have been held sacred and unalterable. Whether we agree with the present protestant dissenters in the points at the Revolution held essential and fundamental among Christians, or in any other fundamental, at present it is impossible for us to know; because, at their own very earnest desire, we have repealed the toleration act of William and Mary, and discharged them from the signature required by that act; and because, for the far greater part, they publickly declare against all manner of con

It may not be amiss, on account of the light which it will throw on this discussion, to look a little more narrowly into the matter of that oath -in order to discover how far it has hitherto operated, or how far in future it ought to operate, as a bar to any proceedings of the crown and parlia-fessions of faith, even the consensus. ment in favour of those, against whom it may be supposed that the king has engaged to support the

For reasons forcible enough at all times, but at this time particularly forcible with me, I dwell a

little the longer upon this matter, and take the more pains, to put us both in mind that it was not settled at the Revolution, that the state should be protestant, in the latitude of the term, but in a defined and limited sense only, and that, in that sense only the king is sworn to maintain it. To suppose that the king has sworn with his utmost power to maintain what it is wholly out of his power to discover, or which, if he could discover, he might discover to consist of things directly contradictory to each other, some of them perhaps impious, blasphemous, and seditious upon principle, would be not only a gross, but a most mischievous, absurdity. If mere dissent from the church of Rome be a merit, he that dissents the most perfectly is the most meritorious. In many points we hold strongly with that church. He that dissents throughout with that church will dissent with the church of England, and then it will be a part of his merit that he dissents with ourselves ::-a whimsical species of merit for any set of men to establish. We quarrel to extremity with those, who we know agree with us in many things, but we are to be so malicious even in the principle of our friendships, that we are to cherish in our bosom those who accord with us in nothing, because whilst they despise ourselves, they abhor, even more than we do, those with whom we have some disagreement. A man is certainly the most perfect protestant, who protests against the whole Christian Religion. Whether a person's having no Christian Religion be a title to favour, in exclusion to the largest description of Christians who hold all the doctrines of Christianity, though holding along with them some errours and some superfluities, is rather more than any man, who has not become recreant and apostate from his baptism, will, I believe, choose to affirm. The countenance given from a spirit of controversy to that negative religion may, by degrees, encourage light and unthinking people to a total indifference to every thing positive in matters of doctrine; and, in the end, of practice too. If continued, it would play the game of that sort of active, proselytizing, and persecuting atheism, which is the disgrace and calamity of our time, and which we see to be as capable of subverting a government, as any mode can be of misguided zeal for better things.

Now let us fairly see what course has been taken relative to those, against whom, in part at least, the king has sworn to maintain a church, positive in its doctrine and its discipline. The first thing done, even when the oath was fresh in the mouth of the sovereigns, was to give a toleration to protestant dissenters, whose doctrines they ascertained. As to the mere civil privileges which the dissenters held as subjects before the Revolution, these were not touched at all. The laws have fully permitted, in a qualification for all offices, to such dissenters, an occasional conformity; a thing I believe singular, where tests are admitted. The act called the Test Act itself, is, with regard to them, grown to be hardly any thing more than a dead letter. Whenever the dissenters cease by

their conduct to give any alarm to the government, in church and state, I think it very probable that even this matter, rather disgustful than inconvenient to them, may be removed, or at least so modified as to distinguish the qualification to those offices which really guide the state, from those which are merely instrumental; or that some other and better tests may be put in their place. So far as to England. In Ireland you have outrun us. Without waiting for an English example, you have totally, and without any modification whatsoever, repealed the test as to protestant dissenters. Not having the repealing act by me, I ought not to say positively that there is no exception in it; but if it be what I suppose it is, you know very well, that a Jew in religion, or a Mahometan, or even a publick, declared atheist, and blasphemer, is perfectly qualified to be lord lieutenant, a lord justice, or even keeper of the king's conscience; and by virtue of his office (if with you it be as it is with us) administrator to a great part of the ecclesiastical patronage of the Crown.

Now let us deal a little fairly. We must admit, that protestant dissent was one of the quarters from which danger was apprehended at the Revolution, and against which a part of the coronation oath was peculiarly directed. By this unqualified repeal, you certainly did not mean to deny that it was the duty of the Crown to preserve the church against protestant dissenters; or taking this to be the true sense of the two revolution acts of King William, and of the previous and subsequent union acts of Queen Anne, you did not declare by this most unqualified repeal, by which you broke down all the barriers, not invented indeed, but carefully preserved at the Revolution; you did not then and by that proceeding declare, that you had advised the king to perjury towards God, and perfidy towards the church. No! far, very far from it! you never would have done it, if you did not think it could be done with perfect repose to the royal conscience, and perfect safety to the national established religion. You did this upon a full consideration of the circumstances of your country. Now if circumstances required it, why should it be contrary to the king's oath, his parliament judging on those circumstances, to restore to his catholick people, in such measure, and with such modifications as the publick wisdom shall think proper to add, some part in these franchises which they formerly had held without any limitation at all, and which, upon no sort of urgent reason at the time, they were deprived of? If such means can with any probability be shewn, from circumstances, rather to add strength to our mixed ecclesiastical and secular constitution, than to weaken it; surely they are means infinitely to be preferred to penalties, incapacities, and proscriptions continued from generation to generation. They are perfectly consistent with the other parts of the coronation oath, in which the king swears to maintain "the laws of "God and the true profession of the gospel, and "to govern the people according to the statutes

"in parliament agreed upon, and the laws and than this, that wherever it is judged proper to give customs of the realm." In consenting to such it a legal establishment, it becomes necessary to a statute, the Crown would act at least as agree-deprive the body of the people, if they adhere to ably to the laws of God, and to the true profession their old opinions, of "their liberties and of all of the gospel, and to the laws and customs of the "their free customs," and to reduce them to a kingdom, as George I. did when he passed the state of civil servitude. statute which took from the body of the people every thing which, to that hour, and even after the monstrous acts of the 2d and 8th of Anne, (the objects of our common hatred,) they still enjoyed inviolate.

There is no man on earth, I believe, more willing than I am, to lay it down as a fundamental of the constitution, that the church of England should be united and even identified with it; but, allowing this, I cannot allow that all laws of regulation, It is hard to distinguish with the least degree made from time to time, in support of that fundaof accuracy, what laws are fundamental, and what mental law, are, of course, equally fundamental not. However, there is a distinction between them and equally unchangeable. This would be to conauthorized by the writers on jurisprudence, and found all the branches of legislation and of jurisrecognised in some of our statutes. I admit the I admit the prudence.-The crown and the personal safety of acts of King William and Queen Anne to be fun- the monarch are fundamentals in our constitution: damental, but they are not the only fundamental yet, I hope that no man regrets, that the rabble of laws. The law called Magna Charta, by which statutes got together during the reign of Henry it is provided, that "no man shall be disseised of the Eighth, by which treasons are multiplied with "his liberties and free customs but by the judg- so prolifick an energy, have been all repealed in "ment of his peers, or the laws of the land," a body; although they were all, or most of them, (meaning clearly for some proved crime tried and made in support of things truly fundamental in adjudged,) I take to be a fundamental law. Now, our constitution. So were several of the acts by although this Magna Charta, or some of the statutes which the Crown exercised its supremacy; such as establishing it, provide that that law shall be per- the act of Elizabeth for making the high commispetual, and all statutes contrary to it shall be void, sion courts, and the like; as well as things made yet I cannot go so far as to deny the authority of treason in the time of Charles II. None of this statutes made in defiance of Magna Charta and all species of secondary and subsidiary laws have been its principles. This however I will say, that it is held fundamental. They have yielded to circuma very venerable law, made by very wise and stances particularly where they were thought, learned men, and that the legislature, in their at- even in their consequences, or obliquely, to affect tempt to perpetuate it, even against the authority other fundamentals. How much more, certainly, of future parliaments, have shewn their judgment ought they to give way, when, as in our case, they that it is fundamental, on the same grounds, and affect, not here and there, in some particular point in the same manner, as the act of the fifth of Anne or in their consequence, but universally, collechas considered and declared the establishment of tively, and directly, the fundamental franchises of the church of England to be fundamental. Magna a people, equal to the whole inhabitants of several Charta, which secured these franchises to the sub-respectable kingdoms and states; equal to the jects, regarded the rights of freeholders in counties to be as much a fundamental part of the constitution, as the establishment of the church of England was thought either at that time, or in the act of King William, or in the act of Queen Anne.

The churchmen, who led in that transaction, certainly took care of the material interest of which they were the natural guardians. It is the first article of Magna Charta, "that the church of Eng"land shall be free," &c. &c. But at that period churchmen, and barons, and knights, took care of the franchises and free customs of the people too. Those franchises are part of the constitution itself, and inseparable from it. It would be a very strange thing if there should not only exist anomalies in our laws, a thing not easy to prevent, but, that the fundamental parts of the constitution should be perpetually and irreconcilably at variance with each other. I cannot persuade myself that the lovers of our church are not as able to find effectual ways of reconciling its safety with the franchises of the people, as the ecclesiasticks of the thirteenth century were able to do; I cannot conceive how any thing worse can be said of the protestant religion of the church of England

subjects of the kings of Sardinia or of Denmark; equal to those of the United Netherlands; and more than are to be found in all the states of Switzerland. This way of proscribing men by whole nations as it were, from all the benefits of the constitution to which they were born, I never can believe to be politick or expedient, much less necessary for the existence of any state or church in the world. Whenever I shall be convinced, which will be late and reluctantly, that the safety of the church is utterly inconsistent with all the civil rights whatsoever of the far larger part of the inhabitants of our country, I shall be extremely sorry for it; because I shall think the church to be truly in danger. It is putting things into the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never will be put.

I have said most of what occurs to me on the topicks you touch upon, relative to the religion of the king, and his coronation oath. I shall conclude the observations which I wished to submit to you on this point, by assuring you, that I think you the most remote that can be conceived from the metaphysicians of our times, who are the most foolish of men, and who, dealing in universals and

essences, see no difference between more and less; and who of course would think that the reason of the law which obliged the king to be a communicant of the church of England would be as valid to exclude a catholick from being an exciseman, or to deprive a man who has five hundred a year, under that description, from voting on a par with a factitious protestant dissenting freeholder of forty shillings.

true spirit of the Revolution. But the Revolution operated differently in England and Ireland, in many, and these essential, particulars. Supposing the principles to have been altogether the same in both kingdoms, by the application of those principles to very different objects, the whole spirit of the system was changed, not to say reversed. In England it was the struggle of the great body of the people for the establishment of their liRecollect, my dear friend, that it was a funda- berties against the efforts of a very small facmental principle in the French monarchy, whilst tion, who would have oppressed them. In Ireit stood, that the state should be catholick; yet the land it was the establishment of the power of the edict of Nantz gave, not a full ecclesiastical, but a smaller number, at the expense of the civil libercomplete civil establishment, with places of which ties and properties of the far greater part; and at only they were capable, to the Calvinists of France; the expence of the political liberties of the whole. and there were very few employments indeed of It was, to say the truth, not a revolution, but a which they were not capable. The world praised conquest; which is not to say a great deal in its the Cardinal de Richelieu, who took the first op- favour. To insist on every thing done in Ireland portunity to strip them of their fortified places and at the Revolution, would be to insist on the severe cautionary towns. The same world held and does and jealous policy of a conqueror, in the crude hold in execration (so far as that business is con- settlement of his new acquisition, as a permanent cerned) the memory of Louis the Fourteenth, for rule for its future government. This, no power, the total repeal of that favourable edict; though in no country that ever I heard of, has done or the talk of" fundamental laws, established reli- professed to do-except in Ireland; where it is gion, religion of the prince, safety to the state," done, and possibly by some people will be professed. &c. &c. was then as largely held, and with as bit-Time has, by degrees, in all other places and peter a revival of the animosities of the civil confusions during the struggles between the parties, as now they can be in Ireland.

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Perhaps there are persons who think that the same reasons do not hold when the religious relation of the sovereign and subject is changed; but they who have their shop full of false weights and measures, and who imagine that the adding or taking away the name of Protestant or Papist, Guelph or Ghibelline, alters all the principles of equity, policy, and prudence, leave us no common data upon which we can reason. I therefore pass by all this, which on you will make no impression, to come to what seems to be a serious consideration in your mind; I mean the dread you express of" reviewing, for the purpose of altering, the principles of the Revolution." This is an interesting topick; on which I will, as fully as your leisure and mine permits, lay before you the ideas I have formed.

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First, I cannot possibly confound in my mind all the things which were done at the Revolution, with the principles of the Revolution. As in most great changes, many things were done from the necessities of the time, well or ill understood, from passion or from vengeance, which were not only not perfectly agreeable to its principles, but in the most direct contradiction to them. I shall not think that the deprivation of some millions of people of all the rights of citizens, and all interest in the constitution, in and to which they were born, was a thing conformable to the declared principles of the Revolution. This I am sure is true relatively to England, (where the operation of these anti-principles comparatively were of little extent,) and some of our late laws, in repealing acts made immediately after the Revolution, admit that some things then done were not done in the

riods, blended and coalited the conquered with the conquerors. So, after some time, and after one of the most rigid conquests that we read of in history, the Normans softened into the English. I wish you to turn your recollection to the fine speech of Cerealis to the Gauls, made to dissuade them from revolt. Speaking of the Romans," Nos

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quamvis toties lacessiti, jure victoriæ id solum "vobis addidimus, quo pacem tueremur: nam neque quies gentium sine armis; neque arma sine stipendiis; neque stipendia sine tributis, haberi queant. Cætera in communi sita sunt: ipsi plerumque nostris exercitibus presidetis: ipsi has aliasque provincias regitas: nil separatum "clausumve-Proinde pacem et urbem, quam "victores victique eodem jure obtinemus, amate, "colite." You will consider, whether the arguments used by that Roman to these Gauls, would apply to the case in Ireland; and whether you could use so plausible a preamble to any severe warning you may think it proper to hold out to those, who should resort to sedition, instead of supplication, to obtain any object that they may pursue with the governing power.

For a much longer period than that which had sufficed to blend the Romans with the nation to which of all others they were the most adverse, the protestants settled in Ireland, consider themselves in no other light than that of a sort of a colonial garrison, to keep the natives in subjection to the other state of Great Britain. The whole spirit of the Revolution in Ireland, was that of not the mildest conqueror. In truth, the spirit of those proceedings did not commence at that æra, nor was religion of any kind their primary object. What was done, was not in the spirit of a contest between two religious factions; but between two adverse nations. The statutes of Kilkenny shew,

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