LXXIX. 3.

Applications to Parliament for a Repeal of the Laws requiring Subscriptions of the Thirty-nine Articles.

IN July 1762, a point of extreme importance to the protestant dissenters, came on for trial at Guildhall. It has been shown, that the corporation act incapacitates dissenters refusing to qualify, in the manner which it prescribed, from holding offices in corporations: but the act did not prevent their eligibility to such offices. In some instances, dissenters were elected to them, and refused to serve in them, and therefore became liable to the penalty of a fine. The payment of it was sometimes dispensed with, but it was sometimes exacted.

At the time, of which we are now speaking, Mr. Allen Evans, having been chosen sheriff of the city of London, and having refused to serve, was fined; and, upon his neglecting to pay the fine, the city brought an action against him to recover it. The case was elaborately argued before lord chief baron Parker, Mr. justice Foster, Mr. justice Wilmot, and Mr. justice Bathurst. All of them were of opinion that, under the circumstances, in which the act had placed them, the dissenters were not eligible to the office. The case was heard on appeal, in February 1767, in the house of lords; and, on the motion of lord Mansfield, the cause was adjudged unanimously in favour of the dissenters.

This determination raised the hopes of the dissenters; but objections to the subscription of the

thirty-nine articles were not confined to them. In 1772, several clergymen, and some gentlemen belonging to the professions of the civil law and physic,-all members of the established church,assembled at the Feathers tavern in Cheapside, and invited by public advertisement in the papers, all, who thought themselves aggrieved in the matter of subscription, to join them in an application to parliament for relief. The petition was respectably signed two hundred and fifty of the petitioners were clergymen of the established church.

They represented in the petition, that it was one of the great principles of the protestant religion, that every thing necessary to salvation was fully and sufficiently contained in the holy scriptures; that christians have an inherent right, which they hold from God only, to make a full and free use of their private judgment in the interpretation of the scriptures; that, though these were the liberal and original doctrines of the church of England, and the grand principle upon which the reformation was grounded, still, there had been a deviation from them, in the matter of subscription, which deprived them of this invaluable right,—by obliging them to acknowledge, that certain articles and confessions of faith and doctrine, drawn up by fallible men, were, all and every of them, agreeable to the scriptures.

The petitioners particularly complained, that, at the first admission or matriculation, as it is termed, of scholars in the universities, they were obliged, at an age too immature for disquisitions and deci

sions of such moment, to subscribe their unfeigned assent to a variety of theological propositions, which they had not judgment to comprehend; and upon which it was impossible for them to form a just opinion.

The petition being presented, a motion was made for taking it into consideration: the house of commons divided seventy-one for it, two hundred and seventeen against it.

However unfavourable to the cause of the dissenters, this result appeared, they conceived the weight of argument to have been evidently so much on their side, that they procured a bill for their relief to be brought into the house of commons in the same sessions. A high church party opposed it with great earnestness; but the general sense of the house was so strong in favour of the dissenters, and an inclination to extend the blessings of toleration was so great on each side of the house, that the motion was carried without a division. But the house of lords was actuated by a different feeling,there, the bill was thrown out by a great majority, twenty-nine lords supporting it, one hundred and two lords opposing it.

In 1789, the matter was again brought into the house of commons, by a motion of Mr. Beaufoy, "for a committee to take into consideration, so "much of the test and corporation acts as related "to protestant dissenters." On a division, one hundred and two votes were for the motion, one hundred and twenty-two against it.

The small majority on this division against the

dissenters could not but raise their hopes; but it equally increased the alarm and the activity of their opponents; and unfortunately the violence of some leading men among the petitioners furnished their adversaries with powerful arms against them.

On the 2d of March 1790, Mr. Fox brought the subject before the house of commons, at the fullest meeting of that house, which had, for some time, been assembled. The petition of the dissenters had been placed in his hands, and it is an important event in the history of the English catholics, that it was framed in terms, which embraced persons of their communion. This brought their grievances under the eye of the legislature. Mr. Fox displayed on this occasion, more than his usual powers of oratory; his motion was the same as that of Mr. Beaufoy; but he distinctly avowed that his object was to effect a total repeal both of the corporation and the test act, and he rested the merits of his cause on the broadest principles of religious liberty. He was seconded by sir Henry Houghton: Mr. Pitt opposed the motion by a long and able speech. It was reducible to a syllogism,—that it was equally the right and duty of the supreme power of the state to exclude any description of men, who were hostile to an essential part of the constitution, from those situations, which would enable them to give effect to that hostility; that the established church was an essential part of the British constitution, and that the dissenters were hostile to it:-therefore it was the right and duty of the state to exclude the dissenters from those situations, which would

enable them to injure the church, and consequently proper to continue the corporation and test acts in force against them, as these effected this exclusion. Mr. Pitt then noticed the intemperate proceedings of some of the dissenting leaders. Here, Mr. Burke came powerfully to his aid: he produced several documents, from which he professed to show, that many of the persons who styled themselves dissenters, in the petitions before the house, were indifferent to religion, that they held factious principles and entertained dangerous projects, and thus had the name without the substance of religion, the liberty without the temper of philosophy, and professed doctrines and were engaged in schemes at which the priest and the magistrate might equally tremble *.

Mr. Fox replied to Mr. Pitt and Mr. Burke with great animation:-conceding to Mr. Pitt that it was the right and duty of the state to exclude men really dangerous, from situations conferring power, he contended that the dissenters entertained no designs, and had no object that was hostile either to the church or the state; and that, if they entertained such designs, or had any such objects, the oaths and rites prescribed by the corporation and test acts were not calculated to bring the integrity of their principles to a proper test; the designs and the objects imputed to them, being of a policical, and the oaths and rites required from them, being of a religious nature.-This absurdity, as he termed it, of making a formula of religious faith a test of * Gibbon, Hist. ch. 54.