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    where slept the defenders of the bulwarks of the Church when ; in the W& sion of 1817 , an act of tardy justice to the loyalty and bravery of Norfcon * fornrist officers in the army , was silently performed by the very statesmen who , in the year 1807 , took advantage of a similar attempt by the administration of Lords GrehvHle and Grey , to supplant them in their offices ? The

    anomaly , in the situation of military officers in different parts of the empire , was indeed too prominently cruel and absurd to have longer existed ; but let it not be forgotten , that the dread of a disaffected military power was the urgent cause of the original enactment of the Test Act , and ought , in reason , to outweigh the apprehension of a few Dissenters being elected to civil offices .

    And , lastly , when the free admission of Protestant Dissenters to the senate and the bar is contemplated , ( to say nothing of the power of the press , upon which , fortunately , no test has been imposed , ) must not every reflecting mind be convinced of the egregious inconsistency of holding up the Sacramental Test , even were it practically enforced , as an impregnable barrier 4 : o the Church Establishment , whilst it is left exposed to the attacks df the disaffected through channels so direct and influential ?

    We have thus hastily glanced at some of the prominent features of that case which Protestant Dissenters are enabled to make out , upon an historical review of the circumstances under which the Test Laws were passed , and in which they practically subsist at the present moment , independently of those abstract principles of natural right to which an appeal is seldom made with success in the courts of worldly'policy , and of those grave objections to the profanation of the most solemn and endearing rite of the Ghristian religion ,

    which ought , long ago , to have prompted the substitution of some other test of allegiance to the Church , if indeed her kingdom is so essentially allied to the concerns of this ivorld . To the serious and judicious friends of the Church Establishment we would confidently appeal , whether experience have not evinced that her peaceful ascendancy is best secured by enlarging the bounds of toleration , and thus diminishing the motives to jealousy and dislike in those who are without hear pale ; and whether , in this age of

    progressive light and knowledge , her downfal would not be most assuredly sealed by demonstrating her existence to be incompatible with the free participation of social ri g hts and privileges by those who are without as well as those who are within her pale ? Should we be asked , whence this solicitude for an object which , according to our own shewing , is attained substantially , though not in theory—we answer , t

    1 . That if our only object were to rid the statute book of every trace of religious proscription , and to assimilate in this respect the theory and the practice of our Constitution , it would justify considerable effort and zeal on the part of those , both in and out of the Church , who are jealous for the honour of our laws , as compared with those of other empires , less distinguished in other respects by the freedom of their institutions , and who are anxious that the laws of England , the focus of British dominion , should not be degraded by a reference to those of Ireland , Scotland , Hanover , or Canada .

    2 . That our argument does not go the length of maintaining , that Nonconformists are under no practical restriction or grievance on account of the Test Laws , but merely that the non-enforcement of them has long deprived the friends of the Establishment of all plausible pretence for regarding these half-repealed and more than half-suspended enactments as , necessary to the safety of the Church . The right possessed by every freeman of a corporation of arraigning the most popular candidate for ils offices , on the score of

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    Corporation and Test Acts . 5 f

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1827, page 31, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1792/page/31/