to commend it to every thinking man as soon as the heat engendered by a party debate had passed away.  It had merely placed the sovereign and the subject on the same footing in respect of the security which prescription gave to possession.  And it might, therefore, have been thought that the vote of 1769 had settled the point in every case; since what was the law between one private individual and another, and between the sovereign and a subject, might well have been taken to be of universal application.  But the ministry were strangely unwilling to recognize such a universal character in the late act, and found in the peculiar character of ecclesiastical bodies and ecclesiastical property a pretext for weakening the force of the late enactment, by denying the applicability of the principle to the claims of ecclesiastical chapters.  In 1772 Mr. Henry Seymour, one of the members for Huntingdon, moved for leave to bring in a bill, which he described as one “for quieting the subjects of the realm against the dormant claims of the Church;” or, in other words, for putting the Church on the same footing with respect to property which had passed out of its possession as the crown had been placed in by the act of 1769.  He contended that such a bill ought to be passed, not only on the general principle that possessors who derived their property from one source ought not to be less secure than they who derived it from another, but also on the grounds that, as ecclesiastical bodies occasionally used their power, “length of possession, which fortified and strengthened legal right and just title in every other case, did in this alone render them more weak and uncertain,” from the difficulty which often occurred in finding documentary proof of very ancient titles; and that this was not an imaginary danger, since a member of the House then present had recently lost L120,000 by a bishop reviving a claim to an estate after the gentleman’s family had been in undisturbed possession of it above a hundred years.  The defence of the Church, however, was taken up by Mr. Skinner, Attorney-general for the Duchy of Lancaster, who argued that though, in the case of the crown, the nullum tempus which it had formerly claimed, and which had been put an end to in 1769, was “an engine in the hands of the strong to oppress the weak, the nullum tempus of the Church was a defence to the weak against the strong,” as its best if not its sole security “against the encroachment of the laity.”  The “Parliamentary History” records that in the course of a long debate Lord North opposed the bringing in of the bill, as did “the Lord-advocate of Scotland, who gave as a reason in favor of the bill, though he voted against it, that a law of similar nature had passed in Scotland, and that the whole kingdom, clergy as well as laity, found the very best effects from it."[24] Burke argued in favor of the bill with great force, declaring that in so doing “he did not mean anything against the Church, her dignities, her honor, her privileges, or her possessions; he should wish even to enlarge them all; but this bill was to take nothing from her but the power of making herself odious.”  But the ministerial majority was too well disciplined to be broken, and Mr. Seymour could not even obtain leave to bring in the bill.