As to the coronation oath, to which you allude, as opposite to admitting a Roman Catholic to the use of any franchise whatsoever, I cannot think that the king would be perjured, if he gave his assent to any regulation which Parliament might think fit to make with regard to that affair.  The king is bound by law, as clearly specified in several acts of Parliament, to be in communion with the Church of England.  It is a part of the tenure by which he holds his crown; and though no provision was made till the Revolution, which could be called positive and valid in law, to ascertain this great principle, I have always considered it as in fact fundamental, that the king of England should be of the Christian religion, according to the national legal church for the time being.  I conceive it was so before the Reformation.  Since the Reformation it became doubly necessary; because the king is the head of that church, in some sort an ecclesiastical person,—­and it would be incongruous and absurd to have the head of the Church of one faith, and the members of another.  The king may inherit the crown as a Protestant; but he cannot hold it, according to law, without being a Protestant of the Church of England.

Before we take it for granted that the king is bound by his coronation oath not to admit any of his Catholic subjects to the rights and liberties which ought to belong to them as Englishmen, (not as religionists,) or to settle the conditions or proportions of such admission by an act of Parliament, I wish you to place before your eyes that oath itself, as it is settled in the act of William and Mary.

“Will you to the utmost of your power maintain
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the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel,
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and the Protestant Reformed Religion established by
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law?  And will you preserve unto the bishops and clergy of this realm, and to the churches committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges as by law do or shall appertain unto them, or any of them?—­All this I promise to do.”

Here are the coronation engagements of the king.  In them I do not find one word to preclude his Majesty from consenting to any arrangement which Parliament may make with regard to the civil privileges of any part of his subjects.

It may not be amiss, on account of the light which it will throw on this discussion, to look a little more narrowly into the matter of that oath,—­in order to discover how far it has hitherto operated, or how far in future it ought to operate, as a bar to any proceedings of the crown and Parliament in favor of those against whom it may be supposed that the king has engaged to support the Protestant Church of England in the two kingdoms in which it is established by law.  First, the king swears he will maintain to the utmost of his power “the laws of God.”  I suppose it means the natural moral laws.—­Secondly,