PETITION TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, FROM THE UNITARIAN CONGREGATION OF THE NEW GRAVEL-PIT MEET

ING-HOUSE, HACKNEY, FOR THE REPEAL OF THE CORPORATION AND TEST ACTS.

[Presented by Mr. JOHN SMITH, on Monday, February 4.*]

To the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in Parliament asseinbled,

* The Morning Chronicle reports Mr. John Smith's speech on the occasion as follows:

Mr. JOHN SMITH rose to present a petition from the Unitarians' Meeting in the parish of Hackney. "I regret," said the Honourable Gentleman, "that the length of this petition will render it inexpedient for me to solicit the House to hear it read, because certainly the case of the petitioners is stated in a manner which does them great credit. I shall move, of course, that it be printed, and the House will then be in a condition to judge of its merits. But I trust I may take the liberty to avail myself of this opportunity, for the purpose of adverting to a calumny which is now in circulation respecting the Dissenters. I trust the House will, for this purpose, hear the few words I wish to address to it. It has been publicly stated in the newspapers and elsewhere, that the Dissenters have united with the Catholics on this occasion, for the attainment of their common rights. I am authorized to say they have done no such thing. If any gentleman has a doubt as to this fact, I have it in my power to dispel it in one moment. There is a committee now sitting, to which is entrusted the management of the application to Parliament for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. This committee, I believe, speaks, on the whole, the sense of the Dissenters of the United Kingdom, and it has this day come to a Resolution, which, as it is very short, I will read to the House. It is to this effect: This United Committee, acting on their own best judgment, and on the recommendation of some of their Parliamentary friends, have thought it expedient not to unite their application to Parliament with that of the Roman Catholics; but they disavow the inference, that their acting separately or inde.. pendently proceeds from any hostility to the claims of that numerous and respectable body of petitioners. No calumny, I am sure, can be more scandalous than that which has been so frequently repeated, that the Dissenters are averse to the claims of the Catholics. I have long known the reverse. I know well the contrary myself. The immense majority of the Dissenting Body is favourable to the claims of the Catholics; and among that majority will be found all the names, and they are not a few, which are eminent in that body for talent and ability. On this occasion they have been advised by the friends of their cause to act separately and independently; and I do assure the House, that from my personal knowledge of them, that advice was readily and cheerfully accepted."

The petition was ordered to be printed. It was for the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts.

The petition of the undersigned, being worshipers in the Unitarian Congregation assembling in the New Gravel-Pit Meeting-House, in the Parish of Hackney, in the county of Middlesex,

Sheweth,

That your petitioners are Protestant Dissenters; all of them from a sincere conviction that nonconformity to the Doctrine and Worship of the Church of England is their bounden Christian duty, as before Almighty God,-and some of them in succession from ancestors who never were members of that Church, as now by law established.

That your petitioners have learned from the Holy Scriptures, and from the Christian writers of all ages and communions who have best understood and expounded them, that the rights of Conscience are infinitely above all earthly jurisdiction, and that no man is amenable to any other man or men for his faith and worship, of which that Great Being, who alone is infallible, and who searcheth the heart, is the sole rightful Judge.

That your petitioners are fully convinced by observation and inquiry, that a diversity of religious opinions and religious forms, is by no means incompatible with the equal and perfect discharge of both civil and moral duties; and that a community in which such diversity prevails to the greatest extent, may attain to all the happiness which the Supreme Arbiter of good has designed that nations should enjoy, provided there be no interference on the part of the Governors or the governed, of the many or the few, with the high, natural and inalienable rights of Conscience.

That the experience of a long succession of ages has proved also that all attempts to compel or to restrain religious belief are nugatory; and that all pains and penalties and disabilities laid upon men for the expression of their religious and Christian belief, or for acting up to it in Divine worship, are in reality the punishment of them for their integrity and sincerity, (which are the best pledges of their being good citizens,) and are, moreover, of the nature of persecution for righteousness' sake, the sin which is above all others forbidden and condemned by our Holy Religion.

That, as Protestant Dissenters, your petitioners stand on the same ground of religious right relatively to the Church of England, on which all Protestants stand relatively to

the Church of Rome; and that no argument can be imagined for the degradation and annoyance of Protestant Dissenters living amongst Episcopalian Protestants, that may not be urged with tenfold force in justification of the persecution of Protestants living amongst Roman Catholics.

That the comparative number of the professors of any one faith, is of no moment whatever in the estimate of the rights of Conscience. Here, every man has the same claims as all mankind united. The majority, however large, consists of individuals, each of whom is naturally as fallible as any one of the minority. To give the majority, therefore, the power of oppressing the minority, on account of matters of pure religious Conscience, is virtually to adopt and proclaim the maxim, which all enlightened legislators, all upright magistrates and nearly all Christian moralists have denounced as the greatest of all political errors, viz. that Might constitutes Right.

That for these and many other reasons, your petitioners hold perfect religious liberty to be amongst the first of civil rights; and thus thinking and feeling, they pray your honourable House to repeal all the laws which enact the Sacramental Test as a qualificatiou for civil and political office and trust;-laws by which they and their children are deeply injured in the various relations of social life, but the grievance of which they still more keenly feel as fastening upon them, in the eyes of their fellow-citizens, a badge of dishonour.

That your petitioners cannot believe it to be the wish of your Honourable House that any Englishmen, not disqualified by vice and crime, should be branded as aliens in the land of their fathers; which, yet, the Protestant Dissenters of this country are, in so far as they are declared unworthy of being called to the service of their King or their fellow-citizens.

That your petitioners are utterly unable to conceive what good can now be contemplated by the Test Laws, which either exact a reluctant conformity which is of no possible advantage to the Established Church, but by which he that yields it, is lowered both in his own esteem and in that of Christians of his own communion; or deprive England of the benefit of the talents and energies of a multitude of her sons, who have shewn by their conduct that they are equally able and ready, as any class of Englishmen whatever, to promote the wealth, the freedom, the moral and in

tellectual character and the honourable repute of their mother-country.

That your petitioners would remind your Honourable House, that the Test Laws which were formerly imposed upon the Protestant Dissenters of Ireland, have been repealed in that country nearly half a century; and that, notwithstanding the danger and mischief prognosticated by the opposers of the repeal as the certain consequence of this great measure of justice and charity, no evils whatever are pretended to have arisen from it; but, on the contrary, so manifest are the good effects to the whole nation, of the relief granted by it to Protestant Dissenters, that your petitioners believe that were it now proposed to re-enact the Test Laws in Ireland, there is scarcely a single member of the Irish Established Church who would not resist the proposal, with all his might, as unjust, uncharitable and impolitic, in reference not only to the State but also to the Church.

That, as your petitioners are persuaded, it cannot fail of appearing to your Honourable House, on a full consideration of the case, that the Test Laws are wholly unsuited to this country in the present enlightened age; and are, in fact, the relics of a barbarous policy, which has been long abandoned by almost every civilized people. To this conclusion your petitioners have come by seeing that your Honourable House passes yearly Indemnity Acts by which these Laws are, in part, and from time to time, virtually repealed but they humbly beg permission to represent to your Honourable House that these annual Acts are in the opinion of some of our ablest lawyers a very doubtful and uncertain protection; that they contemplate merely the omission, from inadvertency and other causes, of the Sacramental qualification, and do not apply, except by a latitude of construction, which is discretionary with judges, to the case of Protestant Dissenters, who from a principle of conscience refuse to qualify; that if they grant liberty, it is but for a prescribed period, which liberty is the pri-vilege only of slaves; that the stigma which they inflict still remains; and that the very grant of Indemnity is galling to the minds of those who are not conscious of any offence, and therefore cannot feel that they stand in need of pardon or forbearance.

That viewing the subject, on every side, with all the attention of which they are capable, your petitioners are as

firmly persuaded, as they can be of any practical truth whatever, that all classes of His Majesty's subjects are equally interested, both for themselves and their children, in the abolition of the distinctions created by the Test Laws: inasmuch as these Laws exclude from places of trust and emolument under His Majesty and in the govern ment of Corporations, all persons, whether Dissenters or Churchmen, who cannot conscientiously take the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper with merely secular views; are a constant irritation and annoyance to those who are thus excluded, and degraded in point of rank and influence; are the sad occasion of splitting this great nation, the union of whose inhabitants is her strength and security, into angry parties; and, by their collateral as well as direct operation, keep alive the sentiments of suspicion, envy, jealousy and resentment, which every patriotic Englishman must desire to see buried in everlasting oblivion.

That your petitioners feel assured that they shall not address a Christian Legislature in vain, when they represent to your Honourable House that, not in their own judgment only, but likewise in that of many of the most pious members, and of some of the most exalted ministers, of the English Church, the Sacramental Test is a lamentable degradation and perversion of one of the most.solemn rites of our common faith; and moreover, that this prostitution of the sacred ordinance of the Lord's Supper to worldly uses, which in the same degree that it wounds tender consciences is matter of sport and scorn to`infidelity, is the peculiar and unhappy distinction of this Christian and Protestant land, never having been known in any age or country until the reign of the family of the Stuarts in Great Britain. Appealing to the known attachment of your Honourable House to the Constitution of these realms, as settled at the glorious Revolution of 1688, which combined all the elements of civil, political and religious freedom, and to your reverence of the great principle, the polar-star of the Reformation from popery, that "the Bible, the Bible only, is the Religion of Protestants," your petitioners are emboldened to hope that your Honourable House will no longer suffer the Sacramental Test to be imposed, to the great scandal of the Christian Religion, to the detriment of the public service, and to the annoyance and injury of so large a proportion of His Majesty's subjects, as the Protestant Dissenters of