The noble duke has said that tests are no securities against the admission of atheists or schismatics, and that a man may take them who dissented from them, if he chose to stifle all his feelings of right and wrong.  But, my lords, I beg leave to say that tests are no security against any man.  It is impossible ever to have looked at the history of religion in any state, or at any period, and not to feel that the test laws have been the weakest ground upon which any faith could stand.  Were tests any security for the heathen religion against the vital spirit of the heaven-descended energy of Christianity?  Yet we are aware that every act of the life of a heathen was in itself a test.  He could not sit to his meat, he could not retire to rest, he could not go through the most simple transactions of life, without some act of acknowledgment offered towards some heathen deity.  Unless these observances were attended to by the Christians, they were subject to the most cruel punishments, and yet such means failed to preserve the dominant faith.  In fact, it is well known that one of the most violent persecutions of the Christians, instituted by the Roman emperors, was followed, as it were, almost immediately by the establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion of the empire.  Were tests any security to the Roman Catholic religion, against the growing light and energy of the Protestant faith?  Tests of various kinds were adopted at the very moment the new doctrines showed themselves, but it was soon found that they were vain and fragile against the light and strength of the new doctrines.  Were tests any security to these very universities themselves?  I have not looked very deeply into this subject; I have no doubt that if I were to look closer into it, I should find more instances of the sort; but I find that about fourteen years after the establishment of King’s College, in the university of Cambridge, a decree was sent down there by King Henry VI., admonishing the scholars, that is to say, in the language of the present day, the fellows of that college, against the damnable and pernicious errors (so it styled them), of John Wickliffe and Richard Peacock, and denouncing the pains of expulsion from college, and perjury, against those of them who should show any favour to those doctrines.  Yet, in two years after this, this very king’s college became what, at that time was called the most heretical, but which now, in our time, would be called the most Protestant college in the university; and we know that these doctrines thus fiercely denounced, and strongly guarded against by tests, about fifty or sixty years afterwards became, by law, the established religion of this country.  It is upon her native strength—­upon her own truth—­it is upon her spiritual character, and upon the purity of her doctrines, that the Church of England rests.  Let her not, then, look for support in such aids as these.  It is by these means, and not by tests and proscriptions, that protestantism has been maintained; let her be assured of this.