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propriety of the terms which are proposed by law as a title to public 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 bishoprics, rectories, and collegiate stalls. When gentlemen complain of the subscription as matter of grievance, the complaint arises from confounding private judgment, whose rights are anterior 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 conditions 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 its 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 universities; the qualifications at All Souls are, that they should be optime nati, bene vestiti, mediocriter docti.

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 and Switzerland.

If you will have religion publicly practised and publicly 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 characteristics 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 superior 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 public interpretation of it.

If the church be, as Mr. Locke defines it, a voluntary society, 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 inquiry, as those who do 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 ob

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vious 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. Jerome's? that of the Thirty-nine 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 Apostolic 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 authorised 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, ethics, 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; when 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 is 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 public 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.

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SPEECH ON A BILL FOR RESTRAINING DORMANT CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH.

IF I considered this bill as an attack upon the church, brought in for the purpose of impoverishing and weakening the clergy, I should be one of the foremost in an early and vigorous opposition to it.

I admit, the same reasons do not press for limiting the claims of the church, that existed for limiting the crown by that wisest of all laws, which has secured the property, the peace, and the freedom of this country from the most dangerous mode of attack which could be made upon them all.

I am very sensible of the propriety of maintaining that venerable body with decency, (and with more than mere decency). I would maintain it according to the ranks wisely established in it with that sober and temperate splendour, that is suitable to a sacred character invested with high dignity.

There ought to be a symmetry between all the parts and orders of a state. A poor clergy in an opulent nation can have little correspondence with the body it is to instruct, and it is a disgrace to the public sentiments of religion. Such irreligious frugality is even bad economy, as the little that is given, is entirely thrown away. Such an impoverished and degraded clergy in quiet times could never execute their duty, and in time of disorder would infinitely aggravate the public confusions.

That the property of the church is a favoured and privileged property, I readily admit. It is made with great wisdom, since a perpetual body with a perpetual duty ought to have a perpetual provision.

The question is not the property of the church, or its security. The question is, whether you will render the principle of prescription a principle of the law of this land, and incorporate it with the whole of your jurisprudence; whether, having given it first against the laity, then against the crown, you will now extend it to the church.

The acts, which were made, giving limitation against the laity, were not acts against the property of those, who might be precluded by limitations The act of quiet against the crown was not against the interests of the crown, but against a power of vexation.

If the principle of prescription be not a constitution of positive NOTE. This motion was made the 17th of February, 1772, and rejected on a division; the numbers being, ayes, 117, nões, 141.

law, but a principle of natural equity, then to hold it out against any man, is not doing him injustice.

That tithes are due of common right is readily granted ;—and if this principle had been kept in its original straitness, it might, indeed, be supposed that to plead an exemption was to plead a long-continued fraud; and that no man could be deceived in such a title; as the moment he bought land he must know that he bought land tithed. Prescription could not aid him, for prescription can only attach on a supposed bona fide possession.

But the fact is, that the principle has been broken in upon.

Here it is necessary to distinguish two sorts of property.-1. Land carries no mark on it to distinguish it as ecclesiastical, as tithes do, which are a charge on land; therefore, though it had been made inalienable, it ought perhaps to be subject to limitation. It might bona fide be held.

But first it was not originally inalienable; no, not by the canon law, until the restraining act of the 11th of Elizabeth. But the great revolution of the dissolution of monasteries by the 31st H. VIII. c. 13, has so mixed and confounded ecclesiastical with lay property, that a man may by every rule of good faith be possessed of it. The statute of Queen Elizabeth, ann. 1, chap. 1, gave away the bishop's lands.

So far as to lands.

As to tithes, they are not things in their own nature subject to be barred by prescription upon the general principle. But tithes and church lands, by the statutes of Henry VIII. and the 11th Eliz. have become objects in commercio; for by coming to the crown they became grantable in that way to the subject, and a great part of the church lands passed through the crown to the people.

By passing to the king, tithes became property to a mixed party; by passing from the king, they became absolutely lay property; the partition-wall was broken down, and tithes and church possession became no longer synonymous terms. No man, therefore, might become a fair purchaser of tithes, and of exemption from tithes.

By the statute of Elizabeth, the lands took the same course, (I will not inquire by what justice, good policy, and decency) but they passed into lay hands, became the object of purchases for valuable consideration, and of marriage settlement.

Now, if tithes might come to a layman, land in the hands of a layman might be also tithe free. So that there was an object, which a layman might become seized of equitably and bona fide; there was something, on which a prescription might attach, the end of which

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