the great points of the Christian faith: but that orthodoxy concerns them only as individuals. As a qualification for employment, we all know that in Ireland it is not necessary that they should profess any religion at all: so that the war that we make is upon certain theological tenets, about which scholastic disputes are carried on æquo Marte by controvertists, on their side, as able and as learned, and perhaps as well intentioned, as those are who fight the battle on the other part. To them I would leave those controversies. I would turn my mind to what is more within its competenco, and has been more my study, (though for a man of the world I have thought of those things,) I mean the moral, civil, and political good of the countries we belong to, in which God has appointed your station and mine. Let every man be as pious as he pleases; and in the way that he pleases; but it is agreeable neither to piety nor to policy to give exclusively all manner of civil privileges and advantages to a negative religion, such is the protestant without a certain creed; and at the same time to deny those privileges to men, whom we know to agree to an iota in every one positive doctrine, which all of us who profess the religion authoritatively taught in England, hold ourselves, according to our faculties, bound to believe. The catholics of Ireland (as I have said) have the whole of our positive religion; our difference is only a negation of certain tenets of theirs. If we strip ourselves of that part of catholicism, we abjure Christianity. If we drive them from that holding without engaging them in some other positive religion, (which you know by our qualifying laws we do not,) what do we better, than to hold out to them terrours on the one side, and bounties on the other, in favour of that, which, for any thing we know to the contrary, may be pure atheism? You are well aware, that when a man renounces the Roman religion, there is no civil înconvenience or incapacity whatsoever, which shall hinder him from joining any new or old sect of dissenters; or of forming a sect of his own invention, upon the most antichristian principles. Let Mr. Thomas Paine obtain a pardon, (as on change of ministry he may,) there is nothing to hinder him from setting up a church of his own in the very midst of you. He is a natural-born British subject. His French citizenship does not disqualify him, at least upon a peace. This protestant apostle is as much above all suspicion of popery, as the greatest and most zealous of your sanhedrim in Ireland can possibly be. On purchas ing a qualification, (which his friends of the directory are not so poor as to be unable to effect,) he may sit in parliament; and there is no doubt that there is not one of your tests against popery, that he will not take as fairly, and as much er animo, as the best of your zealous statesmen. I push this point no further; and only adduce this example (a pretty strong one, and fully in point) to show what I take to be the madness and folly of driving men, under the existing circumstances, from any positive religion whatever, into the irreligion of the times, and its sure concomitant principles of anarchy. When religion is brought into a question of civil and political arrangement, it must be considered more politically than theologically, at least by us, who are nothing more than mere laymen. In that light the case of the catholics of Ireland is peculiarly hard, whether they be laity or clergy. If any of them take part, like the gentleman you mention, with some of the most accredited protestants of the country in projects, which cannot be more abhorrent to your nature and disposition than they are to mine; in that case, however few, these catholic factions, who are united with factious protestants, may be; (and very few they are now, whatever shortly they may be come ;) on their account the whole body is considered as of suspected fidelity to the crown, and as wholly undeserving of its favour. But if, on the contrary, in those districts of the kingdom where their numbers are the greatest, where they make, in a manner, the whole body of the people, (as, out of cities, in three-fourths of the kingdom they do,) these catholics show every mark of loyalty and zeal in support of the government, which at best looks on them with an evil eye; then their very loyalty is turned against their claims. They are represented as a contented and happy people; and that it is unnecessary to do any thing more in their favour. Thus the factious disposition of a few among the catholics, and the loyalty of the whole mass, are equally assigned as reasons for not putting them on a par with those protestants, who are asserted by the governmen! itself, which frowns upon papists, to be in 2 state of nothing short of actual rebellion, ano in a strong disposition to make common cause with the worst foreign enemy, that these countries have ever had to deal with. What in the end can come of all this? As to the Irish catholic clergy, their condition is likewise most critical: if they endeavour by their influence to keep a dissatisfied laitv in quiet, they are in danger of losing the little credit they possess, by being considered as the instruments of a government adverse to the civil interest of their flock. If they let things take their course, they will be represented as colluding with sedition, or at least tacitly encouraging it. If they remonstrate against persecution, they propagate rebellion. Whilst government publicly avows hostility to that people, as a part of a regular system, there is no road they can take which does not lead to their ruin. If nothing can be done on your side of the water, I promise you that nothing will be done here. Whether in reality or only in appearance, I cannot positively deterinine; but you will be left to yourselves by the ruling powers here. It is thus ostensibly and above-board; and in part, I believe, the disposition is real. As to the people at large in this country, I am sure they have no disposition to intermeddle in your affairs. They mean you no ill whatever; and they are too ignorant of the state of your affairs to be able to do you any good. Whatever opinion they have on your subject is very faint and indistinct; and if there is any thing like a formed notion, even that amounts to no more than a sort of humming, that r mains on their ears, of the burden of the old song about popery. Poor souls, they are to be pitied, who think of nothing but dangers long past by, and but little of the perils that actually surround them. I have been long, but it is almost a neces sary consequence of dictating, and that by snatches, as a relief from pain gives me the means of expressing my sentiments. They can have little weight as coming from me; and I have not power enough of mind or body to bring them out with their natural force. But I do not wish to have it concealed, that I am of the same opinion to my last breath, which I entertained when my faculties were at the best; and I have not held back from men in power in this kingdom, to whom I have very good wishes, any part of my sentiments on this melancholy subject, so long as I had means of access to persons of their consideration. I have the honour to be, &c FRAGMENTS AND NOTES OF SPEECHES. DURING the period of MR. BURKE'S parliamentary labours, some alterations in the acts of uiniformity, and the repeal of the test and corporation acts, were agitated at various times in the house of commons. It appears, from the state of his MS. papers, that he had designed to publish some of the SPEECHES, which he delivered in those discussions, and with that view had preserved the following FRAGMENTS and detached NOTES; which are now given to the public, with as much order and connection as their imperfect condition renders them capable of receiving. The speeches on the Middlesex election; on shortening the duration of parliaments; on the reform of the representation in parliament; on the bill for explaining the power of juries in prosecutions for libels; and on the repeal of the marriage act, were found in the same imperfect state. SPEECH On the petition, which was presented to the house of commons, from certain clergymen of the church of England, and from certain of the two professions of civil law and physic, and others; praying to be relieved from subscription to the thirty-nine articles, as required by the acts of uniformity.* MR. SPEAKER, I SHOULD not trouble the house upon this question, if I could at all acquiesce in many of the arguments, or justify the vote I The persons associated for this purpose were distinguished at the time by the name of The Fea thers Tavern Association,' from the place where their meetings were usually held. Their peti tion was presented on the 6th of February, 1772; and on a motion that it should be brought up, the same was negat'ved on a division, in which Mr. Burke voted in the majority, by 217 against 71 shall give upon several of the reasons which have been urged in favour of it. I should indeed be very much concerned, if I were thought to be influenced to that vote by those arguments. In particular, I do most exceedingly condemn all such arguments as involve any kind of reflection on the personal character of the gentlemen, who have brought in a petition so decent in the style of it, and so constitutional in the mode. Besides the unimpeachable integrity and piety of many of the promoters of this petition, which render those aspersions as idle as they are unjust, such a way of treating the subject can have no other effect than to turn the attention of the house from the merits of the petition, the only thing properly before us, and which we are sufficiently competent to decide upon, to the motives of the petitioners, which belong exclusively to the great searcher of hearts. We all know that those who loll at their ease in high dignities, whether of the church or of the state, are commonly averse to all reformation. It is hard to persuade them that there can be any thing amiss in establishments, which by feeling experience they find to be so very comfortable. It is as true that from the same selfish motives, those who are struggling upwards are apt to find every thing wrong and out of order. These are truths upon one side and on the other; and neither on the one side or the other, in argument, are they worth a farthing. I wish therefore so much had not been said upon these ill-chosen, and worse than ill-chosen, these very invidious topics. I wish still more that the dissentions and animosities, which had slept for a century, had not been just now most unseasonably revived. But if we must be driven, whether we will or not, to recollect these unhappy transactions, let our memory be complete and equitable, let us recollect the whole of them together. If the dissenters, as an honourable gentleman has described them, have formerly risen from a "whining, canting, snivelling generation," to be a body dreadful and ruinous to all our establishments, let him call to mind the follies, the violences, the outrages and persecutions, that conjured up, very blameably, but very naturally, that same spirit of retaliation. Let him recollect, along with the injuries, the services which dissenters have done to our church and to our state. If they have once destroyed, more than once they have saved them. This is but common justice, which they and all mankind have a right to. There are, Mr. Speaker, besides these pre judices and animosities, which I would have wholly removed from the debate, things more regularly and argumentatively urged against the petition, which, however, do not at all appear to me conclusive. First, two honourable gentlemen, one near me, the other I think on the other side of the house, assert, that if you alter her symbols, you destroy the being of the church of England. This, for the sake of the liberty of that church, I must absolutely deny. The church, like every body corporate, may alter her laws without changing her identity. As an inde pendent church, professing fallibility, she has claimed a right of acting without the consent of any other; as a church, she claims, and has always exercised, a right of reforming whatever appeared amiss in her doctrine, her discipline, or her rites. She did so, when she shook off the papal supremacy in the reign of Henry VIII. which was an act of the body of the English church, as well as of the state, (I don't inquire how obtained.) She did so, when she twice changed the liturgy in the reign of King Edward, when she then esta blished articles which were themselves a variation from former professions. She did so, when she cut off three articles from her ori ginal forty-two, and reduced them to the present thirty-nine; and she certainly would not lose her corporate identity, nor subvert her fundamental principles, though she were to leave ten of the thirty-nine which remain out of any future confession of her faith. She would limit her corporate powers on the contrary, and she would oppose her fundamental principles, if she were to deny herself the prudential exercise of such capacity of reformation. This, therefore, can be no objection to your receiving the petition. In the next place, sir, I am clear that the act of union, reciting and ratifying one Scotcn and one English act of parliament, has not rendered any change whatsoever in our church. impossible, but by a dissolution of the unior. between the two kingdoms. The honourable gentleman who has last touched upon that point, has not gone quite so far as the gentlemen who first insisted upon it. However, as none of them wholly abandon that post, it will not be safe to leave it behind me unattacked. I believe no one will wish their interpretation of that act to be considered as authentic. What shall we think of the wisdom (to say nothing of the competence) of that legislature, which should ordain to itself such a fundamental law at its 444 cutset, as to disable itself from executing its own functions; which should prevent it from making any further laws, however wanted, and that too on the most interesting subject that belongs to human society, and where she most frequently wants its interposition; which should fix those fundamental laws that are for ever to prevent it from adapting itself to its opinions, however clear, or to its own necessities, however urgent? Such an act, Mr. Speaker, would for ever put the church out of its own power; it certainly would put it far above the state, and erect it into that species of independency which it has been the great principle of our policy to prevent. The act never meant, I am sure, any such unnatural restraint on the joint legislature it was then forming. History shows us what it meant, and all that it could mean with any degree of common sense. In the reign of Charles the First, a violent and ill-considered attempt was made unjustly to establish the platform of the government, and the rites of the church of England in Scotland, contrary to the genius and desires of far the majority of that nation. This usurpation excited a most mutinous spirit in that country. It produced that shocking fanatical covenant (I mean the covenant of thirty-six) for forcing their ideas of religion on England, This became the and indeed on all mankind. occasion at length of other covenants, and of a Scotch army marching into England to fulfil them; and the parliament of England (for its own purposes) adopted their scheme, took their last covenant, and destroyed the church of England. The parliament, in their ordinance of 1643, expressly assign their desire of conforming to the church of Scotland as a motive for their alteration. To prevent such violent enterprizes on the one side or on the other, since each church was going to be disarmed of a legislature wholly and peculiarly affected to it, and lest this new uniformity in the state should be urged as a reason and ground of ecclesiastical uniformity, the act of union provided, that presbytery should continue the Scotch, as episcopacy the English establishment, and that this separate and mutually independent church government was to be considered as a part of the union, without aiming at putting the regulation within each church out of its own power, without putting both churches out of It could not mean to the power of the state. forbid us to set any thing ecclesiastical in order, but at the expense of tearing up all foundations, and forfeiting the inestimable be nefits (for inestimable they are) which we Well then, sir, this is, I hope, satisfactory. The act of union does not stand in our way: but, sir, gentlemen think we are not competent to the reformation desired, chiefly from our want of theological learning. If we were the legal assembly * * If ever there was any thing to which, from reason, nature, habit, and principle, I am totally averse, it is persecution for conscientious difference in opinion. If these gentlemen complained justly of any compulsion upon them on that article, I would hardly wait for their petitions; as soon as I knew the evil, I would haste to the cure; I would even run before their complaints. I will not enter into the abstract merits of our articles and liturgy-perhaps there are some things in them which one would wish had not been there. They are not without the marks and characters of human frailty. But it is not human frailty and imperfection, and even a considerable degree of them, that becomes a ground for your alteration; for by no alteration will you get rid of those errours, however you may delight yourself in varying But the to infinity the fashion of them. ground for a legislative alteration of a legal establishment is this, and this only; that you find the inclinations of the majority of the people, concurring with your own sense of the intolerable nature of the abuse, are in favour of a change. If this be the case in the present instance, certainly you ought to make the alteration that is proposed, to satisfy your own consciences, and to give content to your people. But if you have no evidence of this nature, it ill becomes your gravity, on the petition of a few gentlemen, to listen to any thing that tends to shake one of the capital pillars of the state, and alarm the body of your people upon that one ground, in which every hope and fear, every interest, passion, prejudice, every thing which can affect the human breast, are all involved together. If you make this a season for religious alterations, depend upon it you will soon find it a season of religious tumults and religious wars. These gentlemen complain of hardship. No considerable number shews discontent; but in order to give satisfaction to any num ber of respectable men, who come in so de rent and constitutional a mode before us, let us examine a little what that hardship is. They want to be preferred clergymen in the church of England, as by law established; but their consciences will not suffer them to conform to the doctrines and practices of that church; that is, they want to be teachers in a church to which they do not belong; and it is an odd scrt of hardship. They want to receive the emoluments appropriated for teaching one set of doctrines, whilst they are teaching another. A church, in any legal sense, is only a certain system of religious doctrines and practices, fixed and ascertained by some law; by the difference of which laws different churches (as different commonwealths) are made in various parts of the world; and the establishment is a tax laid by the same sovereign authority for payment of those who so teach and so practise. For no legislature was ever so absurd as to tax its people to support men for teaching and acting as they please; but by some prescribed rule. The hardship amounts to this, that the people of England are not taxed two shillings in the pound to pay them for teaching, as divine truths, their own particular fancies. For the state has so taxed the people; and by way of relieving these gentlemen, it would be a cruel hardship on the people to be compelled to pay, from the sweat of their brow, the most heavy of all taxes to men to condemn as heretical the doctrines which they repute to be orthodox, and to reprobate as superstitious the practices which they use as pious and holy. If a man leaves by will an establishment for preaching, such as Boyle's lectures, or for charity sermons, or funeral sermons, shall any one complain of an hardship because he has an excellent sermon upon matrimony, or on the martyrdom of King Charles, or on the restoration, which I, the trustee of the establishment, will not pay him for preaching ?-S. Jenyns, Origin of Evil. Such is the hardship which they complain of under the present church estaBlishment, that they have not the power of taxing the people of England for the maintenance of their private opinions. The laws of toleration provide for every real grievance that these gentlemen can rationally complain of. Are they hindered from professing their belief of what they think to be truth? If they do not like the establishment, there are an hundred different modes of dissent in which they may teach. But even if they are so unfortunately circumstanced, that of all that variety none will please them, they have free liberty to assemble a congregation of their own; and if any persons think their fancies (they may be brilliant imaginations) worth paying for, they are at liberty to maintain them as their clergy, nothing hinders it. But if they cannot get an hundred people together who will pay for their reading a liturgy after their form, with what face can they insist upon the nation's conforming to their ideas for no other visible purpose than the enabling them to receive with a good conscience the tenth part of the produce of your lands. Therefore, beforehand, the constitution has thought proper to take a security, that the tax raised on the people shall be applied only to those who profess such doctrines, and follow such a mode of worship, as the legislature representing the people has thought most agreeable to their general sense; binding as usual the minority not to an assent to the doctrines, but to a payment of the tax. But how do you ease and relieve? How do you know that in making a new door into the church for these gentlemen, you do not drive ten times their number out of it? Supposing the contents and not contents strictly equal in numbers and consequence, the possession, to avoid disturbance, ought to carry it. You dis please all the clergy of England now actually in office, for the chance of obliging a score or two, perhaps, of gentlemen, who are, or want to be, beneficed clergymen; and do you oblige? Alter your liturgy, will it please all even of those who wish an alteration? Will they agree in what ought to be altered? And after it is altered to the mind of every one, you are no further advanced than if you had not taken a single step; because a large body of men will then say, you ought to have no liturgy at all. And then these men, who now complain so bitterly that they are shut out, will themselves bar the door against thousands of others. Dissent, not satisfied with toleration, is not conscience, but ambition. You altered the liturgy for the Directory; this was settled by a set of most learned divines and learned laymen; Selden sat among them. Did this please? It was considered upon both sides as a most unchristian imposition. Well, at the restoration they rejected the Directory, and reformed the common prayer, which, by the way, had been three times reformed before. Were they then contented? Two thousand (or some great number) of clergy resigned their livings in one day rather than read it; and truly, rather than raise that second idol, I should have adhered to the Directory as I now adhere to the common prayer. Nor can |