Under these circumstances, they had to consider what their line of conduct should be, and there never were two ministers better suited to deal with an embarrassment of that kind than the Duke of Wellington and Mr. Peel.  The Duke’s doctrine of government was that “the country was never governed in practice according to the extreme principles of any party whatever;"[196] while Peel’s disposition at all times inclined him to compromise.  He was quite aware that on this and similar questions public feeling had undergone great alteration since the beginning of the century.  There was a large and increasing party, numbering in its ranks many men of deep religious feeling, and many firm supporters of the principle of an Established Church, being also sincere believers in the pre-eminent excellence of the Church of England, who had a conscientious repugnance to the employment of the most solemn ordinance of a religion as a mere political test of a person’s qualifications for the discharge of civil duties.  In the opinion of the Bishop of Oxford (Dr. Lloyd), this was the feeling of “a very large majority of the Church itself,” and of the University.[197] Peel, therefore, came to the conclusion—­to which he had no difficulty in bringing his colleague, the Prime-minister—­that “it might be more for the real interests of the Church and of religion to consent to an alteration in the law” than to trust to the result of the debate in the House of Lords to maintain the existing state of things.  Accordingly, after several conferences with the most influential members of the Episcopal Bench, he framed a declaration to be substituted for the Sacramental test, binding all who should be required to subscribe it—­a description which included all who should be appointed to a civil or corporate office—­never to exert any power or influence which they might thus acquire to subvert, or to endeavor to subvert, the Protestant Church of England, Scotland, or Ireland, as by law established.  The declaration was amended in the House of Lords by the addition of the statement, that this declaration was subscribed “on the true faith of a Christian,” introduced at the instigation of Lord Eldon, who had not held the Great Seal since the dissolution of Lord Liverpool’s administration, but who was still looked up to by a numerous party as the foremost champion of sound Protestantism in either House.

Not that the addition of these words at all diminished the dissatisfaction with which the great lawyer regarded the bill.  On the contrary, he believed it to be not only a weapon wilfully put into the hands of the enemies of the Established Church, but a violation of the constitution, of which, as he regarded it “the existing securities were a part.”  He pointed out that “the King himself was obliged to take the sacrament at his coronation;” and he argued from this and other grounds that “the Church of England, combined with the state, formed together the constitution of Great Britain; and that the acts now to be repealed were necessary to the preservation of that constitution.”