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 Catholic people in such measure, and with such modification 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 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 customs of the realm." In consenting to such a statute, the Crown would act at least as agreeably to the laws of God, and to the true profession of the gospel, and to the laws and customs of the kingdom, as George I. did when he passed the statute which took from the body of the people everything 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.

It is hard to distinguish, with the least degree of accuracy, what laws are fundamental, and what not. However, there is a distinction between them authorised by the writers on jurisprudence, and recognised 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 establishing 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 as the Act of the 5th 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 constitution as the establishment of the Church of England was thought either at that time or in the Act of King William or in 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," etc. etc. 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 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 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, 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 constitution; yet, I hope that no man regrets that the rabble of statutes got together during the reign of Henry VIII. 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 constitution. So were several of the Acts by which the Crown exercised its supremacy, such as the Act of Elizabeth for making the High Com

mission Courts and the like, as well as things made treason in the time of Charles II. None of this species of secondary and subsidiary laws have been held fundamental. They have yielded to circumstances, 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 constitution 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 God they never will be put.

I have said most of what occurs to me on the topics