at a price. The Reformation, one of the greatest periods of human
improvement, was a time of trouble and confusion. The vast structure of
superstition and tyranny which had been for ages in rearing, and which
was combined with the interest of the great and of the many, which was
moulded into the laws, the manners, and civil institutions of nations,
and blended with the frame and policy of states, could not be brought to
the ground without a fearful struggle; nor could it fall without a
violent concussion of itself and all about it. When this great
revolution was attempted in a more regular mode by government, it was
opposed by plots and seditions of the people; when by popular efforts,
it was repressed as rebellion by the hand of power; and bloody
executions (often bloodily returned) marked the whole of its progress
through all its stages. The affairs of religion, which are no longer
heard of in the tumult of our present contentions, made a principal
ingredient in the wars and politics of that time: the enthusiasm of
religion threw a gloom over the politics; and political interests
poisoned and perverted the spirit of religion upon all sides. The
Protestant religion, in that violent struggle, infected, as the Popish
had been before, by worldly interests and worldly passions, became a
persecutor in its turn, sometimes of the new sects, which carried their
own principles further than it was convenient to the original reformers,
and always of the body from whom they parted: and this persecuting
spirit arose, not only from the bitterness of retaliation, but from the
merciless policy of fear.
It was long before the spirit of true piety and true wisdom, involved in
the principles of the Reformation, could be depurated from the dregs and
feculence of the contention with which it was carried through. However,
until this be done, the Reformation is not complete: and those who think
themselves good Protestants, from their animosity to others, are in
that respect no Protestants at all. It was at first thought necessary,
perhaps, to oppose to Popery another Popery, to get the better of it.
Whatever was the cause, laws were made in many countries, and in this
kingdom in particular, against Papists, which are as bloody as any of
those which had been enacted by the Popish princes and states: and where
those laws were not bloody, in my opinion, they were worse; as they were
slow, cruel outrages on our nature, and kept men alive only to insult in
their persons every one of the rights and feelings of humanity. I pass
those statutes, because I would spare your pious ears the repetition of
such shocking things; and I come to that particular law the repeal of
which has produced so many unnatural and unexpected consequences.
A statute was fabricated in the year 1699, by which the saying mass (a
church service in the Latin tongue, not exactly the same as our liturgy,
but very near it, and containing no offence whatsoever against the laws,
or against good morals) was forged into a crime, punishable with
perpetual imprisonment. The teaching school, an useful and virtuous
occupation, even the teaching in a private family, was in every Catholic
subjected to the same unproportioned punishment. Your industry, and the
bread of your children, was taxed for a pecuniary reward to stimulate
avarice to do what Nature refused, to inform and prosecute on this law.
Every Roman Catholic was, under the same act, to forfeit his estate to
his nearest Protestant relation, until, through a profession of what he
did not believe, he redeemed by his hypocrisy what the law had
transferred to the kinsman as the recompense of his profligacy. When
thus turned out of doors from his paternal estate, he was disabled from
acquiring any other by any industry, donation, or charity; but was
rendered a foreigner in his native land, only because he retained the
religion, along with the property, handed down to him from those who had
been the old inhabitants of that land before him.
Does any one who hears me approve this scheme of things, or think there
is common justice, common sense, or common honesty in any part of it? If
any does, let him say it, and I am ready to discuss the point with
temper and candor. But instead of approving, I perceive a virtuous
indignation beginning to rise in your minds on the mere cold stating of
the statute.
But what will you feel, when you know from history how this statute
passed, and what were the motives, and what the mode of making it? A
party in this nation, enemies to the system of the Revolution, were in
opposition to the government of King William. They knew that our
glorious deliverer was an enemy to all persecution. They knew that he
came to free us from slavery and Popery, out of a country where a third
of the people are contented Catholics under a Protestant government. He
came with a part of his army composed of those very Catholics, to
overset the power of a Popish prince. Such is the effect of a tolerating
spirit; and so much is liberty served in every way, and by all persons,
by a manly adherence to its own principles. Whilst freedom is true to
itself, everything becomes subject to it, and its very adversaries are
an instrument in its hands.
The party I speak of (like some amongst us who would disparage the best
friends of their country) resolved to make the king either violate his
principles of toleration or incur the odium of protecting Papists. They
therefore brought in this bill, and made it purposely wicked and absurd
that it might be rejected. The then court party, discovering their game,
turned the tables on them, and returned their bill to them stuffed with
still greater absurdities, that its loss might lie upon its original
authors. They, finding their own ball thrown back to them, kicked it
back again to their adversaries. And thus this act, loaded with the
double injustice of two parties, neither of whom intended to pass what
they hoped the other would be persuaded to reject, went through the
legislature, contrary to the real wish of all parts of it, and of all
the parties that composed it. In this manner these insolent and
profligate factions, as if they were playing with balls and counters,
made a sport of the fortunes and the liberties of their
fellow-creatures. Other acts of persecution have been acts of malice.
This was a subversion of justice from wantonness and petulance. Look
into the history of Bishop Burnet. He is a witness without exception.
The effects of the act have been as mischievous as its origin was
ludicrous and shameful. From that time, every person of that communion,
lay and ecclesiastic, has been obliged to fly from the face of day. The
clergy, concealed in garrets of private houses, or obliged to take a
shelter (hardly safe to themselves, but infinitely dangerous to their
country) under the privileges of foreign ministers, officiated as their
servants and under their protection. The whole body of the Catholics,
condemned to beggary and to ignorance in their native land, have been
obliged to learn the principles of letters, at the hazard of all their
other principles, from the charity of your enemies. They have been taxed
to their ruin at the pleasure of necessitous and profligate relations,
and according to the measure of their necessity and profligacy. Examples
of this are many and affecting. Some of them are known by a friend who
stands near me in this hall. It is but six or seven years since a
clergyman, of the name of Malony, a man of morals, neither guilty nor
accused of anything noxious to the state, was condemned to perpetual
imprisonment for exercising the functions of his religion; and after
lying in jail two or three years, was relieved by the mercy of
government from perpetual imprisonment, on condition of perpetual
banishment. A brother of the Earl of Shrewsbury, a Talbot, a name
respectable in this country whilst its glory is any part of its concern,
was hauled to the bar of the Old Bailey, among common felons, and only
escaped the same doom, either by some error in the process, or that the
wretch who brought him there could not correctly describe his person,--I
now forget which. In short, the persecution would never have relented
for a moment, if the judges, superseding (though with an ambiguous
example) the strict rule of their artificial duty by the higher
obligation of their conscience, did not constantly throw every
difficulty in the way of such informers. But so ineffectual is the power
of legal evasion against legal iniquity, that it was but the other day
that a lady of condition, beyond the middle of life, was on the point of
being stripped of her whole fortune by a near relation to whom she had
been a friend and benefactor; and she must have been totally ruined,
without a power of redress or mitigation from the courts of law, had
not the legislature itself rushed in, and by a special act of Parliament
rescued her from the injustice of its own statutes. One of the acts
authorizing such things was that which we in part repealed, knowing what
our duty was, and doing that duty as men of honor and virtue, as good
Protestants, and as good citizens. Let him stand forth that disapproves
what we have done!
Gentlemen, bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. In such a country as
this they are of all bad things the worst,--worse by far than anywhere
else; and they derive a particular malignity even from the wisdom and
soundness of the rest of our institutions. For very obvious reasons you
cannot trust the crown with a dispensing power over any of your laws.
However, a government, be it as bad as it may, will, in the exercise of
a discretionary power, discriminate times and persons, and will not
ordinarily pursue any man, when its own safety is not concerned. A
mercenary informer knows no distinction. Under such a system, the
obnoxious people are slaves not only to the government, but they live at
the mercy of every individual; they are at once the slaves of the whole
community and of every part of it; and the worst and most unmerciful men
are those on whose goodness they most depend.
In this situation, men not only shrink from the frowns of a stern
magistrate, but they are obliged to fly from their very species. The
seeds of destruction are sown in civil intercourse, in social habitudes.
The blood of wholesome kindred is infected. Their tables and beds are
surrounded with snares. All the means given by Providence to make life
safe and comfortable are perverted into instruments of terror and
torment. This species of universal subserviency, that makes the very
servant who waits behind your chair the arbiter of your life and
fortune, has such a tendency to degrade and abase mankind, and to
deprive them of that assured and liberal state of mind which alone can
make us what we ought to be, that I vow to God I would sooner bring
myself to put a man to immediate death for opinions I disliked, and so
to get rid of the man and his opinions at once, than to fret him with a
feverish being, tainted with the jail-distemper of a contagious
servitude, to keep him above ground an animated mass of putrefaction,
corrupted himself, and corrupting all about him.
The act repealed was of this direct tendency; and it was made in the
manner which I have related to you. I will now tell you by whom the bill
of repeal was brought into Parliament. I find it has been industriously
given out in this city (from kindness to me, unquestionably) that I was
the mover or the seconder. The fact is, I did not once open my lips on
the subject during the whole progress of the bill. I do not say this as
disclaiming my share in that measure. Very far from it. I inform you of
this fact, lest I should seem to arrogate to myself the merits which
belong to others. To have been the man chosen out to redeem our
fellow-citizens from slavery, to purify our laws from absurdity and
injustice, and to cleanse our religion from the blot and stain of
persecution, would be an honor and happiness to which my wishes would
undoubtedly aspire, but to which nothing but my wishes could possibly
have entitled me. That great work was in hands in every respect far
better qualified than mine. The mover of the bill was Sir George
Savile.
When an act of great and signal humanity was to be done, and done with
all the weight and authority that belonged to it, the world could cast
its eyes upon none but him. I hope that few things which have a tendency
to bless or to adorn life have wholly escaped my observation in my
passage through it. I have sought the acquaintance of that gentleman,
and have seen him in all situations. He is a true genius; with an
understanding vigorous, and acute, and refined, and distinguishing even
to excess; and illuminated with a most unbounded, peculiar, and original
cast of imagination. With these he possesses many external and
instrumental advantages; and he makes use of them all. His fortune is
among the largest,--a fortune which, wholly unincumbered as it is with
one single charge from luxury, vanity, or excess, sinks under the
benevolence of its dispenser. This private benevolence, expanding itself
into patriotism, renders his whole being the estate of the public, in
which he has not reserved a _peculium_ for himself of profit, diversion,
or relaxation. During the session the first in and the last out of the
House of Commons, he passes from the senate to the camp; and seldom
seeing the seat of his ancestors, he is always in Parliament to serve
his country or in the field to defend it. But in all well-wrought
compositions some particulars stand out more eminently than the rest;
and the things which will carry his name to posterity are his two bills:
I mean that for a limitation of the claims of the crown upon landed
estates, and this for the relief of the Roman Catholics. By the former
he has emancipated property; by the latter he has quieted conscience;
and by both he has taught that grand lesson to government and
subject,--no longer to regard each other as adverse parties.
Such was the mover of the act that is complained of by men who are not
quite so good as he is,--an act most assuredly not brought in by him
from any partiality to that sect which is the object of it. For among
his faults I really cannot help reckoning a greater degree of prejudice
against that people than becomes so wise a man. I know that he inclines
to a sort of disgust, mixed with a considerable degree of asperity, to
the system; and he has few, or rather no habits with any of its
professors. What he has done was on quite other motives. The motives
were these, which he declared in his excellent speech on his motion for
the bill: namely, his extreme zeal to the Protestant religion, which he
thought utterly disgraced by the act of 1699; and his rooted hatred to
all kind of oppression, under any color, or upon any pretence
whatsoever.
The seconder was worthy of the mover and the motion. I was not the
seconder; it was Mr. Dunning, recorder of this city. I shall say the
less of him because his near relation to you makes you more particularly
acquainted with his merits. But I should appear little acquainted with
them, or little sensible of them, if I could utter his name on this
occasion without expressing my esteem for his character. I am not afraid
of offending a most learned body, and most jealous of its reputation for
that learning, when I say he is the first of his profession. It is a
point settled by those who settle everything else; and I must add (what
I am enabled to say from my own long and close observation) that there
is not a man, of any profession, or in any situation, of a more erect
and independent spirit, of a more proud honor, a more manly mind, a more
firm and determined integrity. Assure yourselves, that the names of two
such men will bear a great load of prejudice in the other scale before
they can be entirely outweighed.
With this mover and this seconder agreed the _whole_ House of Commons,
the _whole_ House of Lords, the _whole_ Bench of Bishops, the king, the
ministry, the opposition, all the distinguished clergy of the
Establishment, all the eminent lights (for they were consulted) of the
dissenting churches. This according voice of national wisdom ought to be
listened to with reverence. To say that all these descriptions of
Englishmen unanimously concurred in a scheme for introducing the
Catholic religion, or that none of them understood the nature and
effects of what they were doing so well as a few obscure clubs of people
whose names you never heard of, is shamelessly absurd. Surely it is
paying a miserable compliment to the religion we profess, to suggest
that everything eminent in the kingdom is indifferent or even adverse to
that religion, and that its security is wholly abandoned to the zeal of
those who have nothing but their zeal to distinguish them. In weighing
this unanimous concurrence of whatever the nation has to boast of, I
hope you will recollect that all these concurring parties do by no means
love one another enough to agree in any point which was not both
evidently and importantly right.
To prove this, to prove that the measure was both clearly and materially
proper, I will next lay before you (as I promised) the political grounds
and reasons for the repeal of that penal statute, and the motives to its
repeal at that particular time.
Gentlemen, America--When the English nation seemed to be dangerously,
if not irrecoverably divided,--when one, and that the most growing
branch, was torn from the parent stock, and ingrafted on the power of
France, a great terror fell upon this kingdom. On a sudden we awakened
from our dreams of conquest, and saw ourselves threatened with an
immediate invasion, which we were at that time very ill prepared to
resist. You remember the cloud that gloomed over us all. In that hour of
our dismay, from the bottom of the hiding-places into which the
indiscriminate rigor of our statutes had driven them, came out the body
of the Roman Catholics. They appeared before the steps of a tottering
throne, with one of the most sober, measured, steady, and dutiful
addresses that was ever presented to the crown. It was no holiday
ceremony, no anniversary compliment of parade and show. It was signed by
almost every gentleman of that persuasion, of note or property, in
England. At such a crisis, nothing but a decided resolution to stand or
fall with their country could have dictated such an address, the direct
tendency of which was to cut off all retreat, and to render them
peculiarly obnoxious to an invader of their own communion. The address
showed what I long languished to see, that all the subjects of England
had cast off all foreign views and connections, and that every man
looked for his relief from every grievance at the hands only of his own
natural government.
It was necessary, on our part, that the natural government should show
itself worthy of that name. It was necessary, at the crisis I speak of,
that the supreme power of the state should meet the conciliatory
dispositions of the subject. To delay protection would be to reject
allegiance. And why should it be rejected, or even coldly and
suspiciously received? If any independent Catholic state should choose
to take part with this kingdom in a war with France and Spain, that
bigot (if such a bigot could be found) would be heard with little
respect, who could dream of objecting his religion to an ally whom the
nation would not only receive with its freest thanks, but purchase with
the last remains of its exhausted treasure. To such an ally we should
not dare to whisper a single syllable of those base and invidious topics
upon which some unhappy men would persuade the state to reject the duty
and allegiance of its own members. Is it, then, because foreigners are
in a condition to set our malice at defiance, that with _them_ we are
willing to contract engagements of friendship, and to keep them with
fidelity and honor, but that, because we conceive some descriptions of
our countrymen are not powerful enough to punish our malignity, we will
not permit them to support our common interest? Is it on that ground
that our anger is to be kindled by their offered kindness? Is it on that
ground that they are to be subjected to penalties, because they are
willing by actual merit to purge themselves from imputed crimes? Lest by
an adherence to the cause of their country they should acquire a title
to fair and equitable treatment, are we resolved to furnish them with
causes of eternal enmity, and rather supply them with just and founded
motives to disaffection than not to have that disaffection in existence
to justify an oppression which, not from policy, but disposition, we
have predetermined to exercise?
What shadow of reason could be assigned, why, at a time when the most
Protestant part of this Protestant empire found it for its advantage to
unite with the two principal Popish states, to unite itself in the
closest bonds with France and Spain, for our destruction, that we should
refuse to unite with our own Catholic countrymen for our own
preservation? Ought we, like madmen, to tear off the plasters that the
lenient hand of prudence had spread over the wounds and gashes which in
our delirium of ambition we had given to our own body? No person ever
reprobated the American war more than I did, and do, and ever shall. But
I never will consent that we should lay additional, voluntary penalties
on ourselves, for a fault which carries but too much of its own
punishment in its own nature. For one, I was delighted with the proposal
of internal peace. I accepted the blessing with thankfulness and
transport. I was truly happy to find _one_ good effect of our civil
distractions: that they had put an end to all religious strife and
heart-burning in our own bowels. What must be the sentiments of a man
who would wish to perpetuate domestic hostility when the causes of
dispute are at an end, and who, crying out for peace with one part of
the nation on the most humiliating terms, should deny it to those who
offer friendship without any terms at all?
But if I was unable to reconcile such a denial to the contracted
principles of local duty, what answer could I give to the broad claims
of general humanity? I confess to you freely, that the sufferings and
distresses of the people of America in this cruel war have at times
affected me more deeply than I can express. I felt every gazette of
triumph as a blow upon my heart, which has an hundred times sunk and
fainted within me at all the mischiefs brought upon those who bear the
whole brunt of war in the heart of their country. Yet the Americans are
utter strangers to me; a nation among whom I am not sure that I have a
single acquaintance. Was I to suffer my mind to be so unaccountably
warped, was I to keep such iniquitous weights and measures of temper and
of reason, as to sympathize with those who are in open rebellion against
an authority which I respect, at war with a country which by every title
ought to be, and is, most dear to me,--and yet to have no feeling at all
for the hardships and indignities suffered by men who by their very
vicinity are bound up in a nearer relation to us, who contribute their
share, and more than their share, to the common prosperity, who perform
the common offices of social life, and who obey the laws, to the full as
well as I do? Gentlemen, the danger to the state being out of the
question, (of which, let me tell you, statesmen themselves are apt to
have but too exquisite a sense,) I could assign no one reason of
justice, policy, or feeling, for not concurring most cordially, as most
cordially I did concur, in softening some part of that shameful
servitude under which several of my worthy fellow-citizens were
groaning.
Important effects followed this act of wisdom. They appeared at home and
abroad, to the great benefit of this kingdom, and, let me hope, to the
advantage of mankind at large. It betokened union among ourselves. It
showed soundness, even on the part of the persecuted, which generally is
the weak side of every community. But its most essential operation was
not in England. The act was immediately, though very imperfectly, copied
in Ireland; and this imperfect transcript of an imperfect act, this
first faint sketch of toleration, which did little more than disclose a
principle and mark out a disposition, completed in a most wonderful
manner the reunion to the state of all the Catholics of that country. It
made us what we ought always to have been, one family, one body, one
heart and soul, against the family combination and all other
combinations of our enemies. We have, indeed, obligations to that
people, who received such small benefits with so much gratitude, and for
which gratitude and attachment to us I am afraid they have suffered not
a little in other places.