Volume IV Part 13 (2/2)

With a qualification it is unquestionably true; not in all its lat.i.tude.

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, wors.h.i.+p, or morals, in the scheme which they professed themselves, and which they imposed 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 contribution towards its support, according to their fancies. This would be consistent. The other always appeared to me to be a monster of contradiction and absurdity. It was for that reason, that, some years ago, I strenuously opposed the clergy who pet.i.tioned, to the number of about three hundred, to be freed from the subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, without proposing to subst.i.tute any other in their place. There never has been a religion of the state (the few years of the Parliament only excepted) but that of _the Episcopal Church of England_: the Episcopal Church of England, before the Reformation, connected with the see of Rome; since then, disconnected, and protesting 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 kingdom (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 Protestant religion. Nay, our Protestant _toleration_ itself, at the Revolution, and until within a few years, required 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 _establis.h.i.+ng_ 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 prudence, 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 praevalida_. The good of the commonwealth is the rule which rides over the rest; and to this every other must completely submit.

The Church of Scotland knows as little of Protestantism _undefined_ as the Church of England and Ireland do. She has by the articles of union secured to herself the perpetual establishment of _the Confession of Faith_, and the _Presbyterian_ Church government. 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 public _wors.h.i.+p_, and the _Westminster Catechism_ as the inst.i.tute of _faith_.

This is to show that at no time was the Protestant religion, _undefined_, established here or anywhere else, as I believe. I am sure, that, when the three religions were established in Germany, they were expressly characterized and declared to be the _Evangelic_, the _Reformed_, and the _Catholic_; 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 Catholic to the use of any franchise whatsoever, I cannot think that the king would be perjured, if he gave his a.s.sent 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 Catholic 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.

”Will you to the utmost of your power maintain 1 2 3 the laws of G.o.d, the true profession of the Gospel, 4 and the Protestant Reformed Religion _established by_ 5 _law_? And will you preserve unto the _bishops_ and clergy of this realm, and to the churches committed to _their_ charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain unto them, or any of them?--All this I promise to do.”

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.

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. .h.i.therto operated, or how far in future it ought to operate, as a bar to any proceedings of the crown and Parliament in favor of those against whom it may be supposed that the king has engaged to support the Protestant Church of England in the two kingdoms in which it is established by law. First, the king swears he will maintain to the utmost of his power ”the laws of G.o.d.” 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 committed to their charge,” in their rights present and future.

The oath as effectually prevents the king from doing anything to the prejudice of the Church, in favor of sectaries, Jews, Mahometans, or plain avowed infidels, as if he should do the same thing in favor of the Catholics. 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 the Third. The act of the 5th of Anne, made in prospect of the Union, is ent.i.tled, ”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”

forever, in the Const.i.tution 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 shows 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 Catholics 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 Catholics, 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 publicly declare against all manner of confessions of faith, even the _Consensus_.

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 lat.i.tude 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 friends.h.i.+ps, 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 t.i.tle to favor, in exclusion to the largest description of Christians, who hold all the doctrines of Christianity, though holding along with them some errors 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 everything 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 anything 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 outran 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 public, 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 G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances of your country. Now, if circ.u.mstances required it, why should it be contrary to the king's oath, his Parliament judging on those circ.u.mstances, to restore to his Catholic people, in such measure and with such modifications as the public 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 shown, from circ.u.mstances, rather to add strength to our mixed ecclesiastical and secular Const.i.tution 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 G.o.d and the true profession of the Gospel, and to govern the people according to the statutes in Parliament agreed upon, and the laws and customs of the realm.” In consenting to such a statute, the crown would act at least as agreeable to the laws of G.o.d, and to the true profession of the Gospel, and to the laws and customs of the kingdom, as George the First did, when he pa.s.sed the statute which took from the body of the people everything which to that hour, and even after the monstrous acts of the 2nd and 8th of Anne, (the objects of our common hatred,) they still enjoyed inviolate.

It is hard to distinguish with the last degree of accuracy what laws are fundamental, and what not. However, there is a distinction between them, authorized by the writers on jurisprudence, and recognized in some of our statutes. I admit the acts of King William and Queen Anne to be fundamental, but they are not the only fundamental laws. The law called _Magna Charta_, by which it is provided that ”no man shall be disseised of his liberties and free customs but by the judgment of his peers or the laws of the land,” (meaning clearly, for some proved crime tried and adjudged,) I take to be _a fundamental law._ Now, although this Magna Charta, or some of the statutes establis.h.i.+ng it, provide that that law shall be perpetual, and all statutes contrary to it shall be void, yet I cannot go so far as to deny the authority of statutes made in defiance of Magna Charta and all its principles. This, however, I will say,--that it is a very venerable law, made by very wise and learned men, and that the legislature, in their attempt to perpetuate it, even against the authority of future Parliaments, have shown their judgment that it is _fundamental_, on the same grounds and in the same manner that the act of the fifth of Anne has considered and declared the establishment of the Church of England to be fundamental. Magna Charta, which secured these franchises to the subjects, regarded the rights of freeholders in counties to be as much a fundamental part of the Const.i.tution 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 England 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 Const.i.tution 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 Const.i.tution 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 ecclesiastics of the thirteenth century were able to do; I cannot conceive how anything worse can be said of the Protestant religion of the Church of England than this,--that, wherever it is judged proper to give it a legal establishment, it becomes necessary to deprive the body of the people, if they adhere to their old opinions, of ”their liberties and of all their free customs,” and to reduce them to a state of _civil_ servitude.

There is no man on earth, I believe, more willing than I am to lay it down as a fundamental of the Const.i.tution, that the Church of England should be united and even identified with it; but, allowing this, I cannot allow that all _laws of regulation_, made from time to time, in support of that fundamental law, are of course equally fundamental and equally unchangeable. This would be to confound all the branches of legislation and of jurisprudence. The _crown_ and the personal safety of the monarch are _fundamentals_ in our Const.i.tution: yet I hope that no man regrets that the rabble of statutes got together during the reign of Henry the Eighth, by which treasons are multiplied with so prolific an energy, have been all repealed in a body; although they were all, or most of them, made in support of things truly fundamental in our Const.i.tution. So were several of the acts by which the crown exercised its supremacy: such as the act of Elizabeth for making the _high commission courts_, and the like; as well as things made treason in the time of Charles the Second. None of this species of _secondary and subsidiary laws_ have been held fundamental. They have yielded to circ.u.mstances; particularly where they were thought, even in their consequences, or obliquely, to affect other fundamentals. How much more, certainly, ought they to give way, when, as in our case, they affect, not here and there, in some particular point, or in their consequence, but universally, collectively, and directly, the fundamental franchises of a people equal to the whole inhabitants of several respectable kingdoms and states: equal to the 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 Const.i.tution to which they were born, I never can believe to be politic 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 G.o.d they never will be put.

I have said most of what occurs to me on the topics 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 a.s.suring 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 Catholic 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 fact.i.tious Protestant Dissenting freeholder of forty s.h.i.+llings.

Recollect, my dear friend, that it was a fundamental principle in the French monarchy, whilst it stood, that the state should be Catholic; yet the Edict of Nantes gave, not a full ecclesiastical, but a complete civil _establishment_, with places of which only they were capable, to the Calvinists of France,--and there were very few employments, indeed, of which they were not capable. The world praised the Cardinal de Richelieu, who took the first opportunity to strip them of their fortified places and cautionary towns. The same world held and does hold in execration (so far as that business is concerned) the memory of Louis the Fourteenth, for the total repeal of that favorable edict; though the talk of ”fundamental laws, established religion, religion of the prince, safety to the state,” &c., &c., was then as largely held, and with as bitter a revival of the animosities of the civil confusions during the struggles between the parties, as now they can be in Ireland.

Perhaps there are persons who think that the same reason does 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 pa.s.s 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 topic, on which I will, as fully as your leisure and mine permits, lay before you the ideas I have formed.

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