thing, if there should not only exist anomalies in our laws, a thing not easy to prevent, but that the fundamental parts of the Constitution should be perpetually and irreconcilably at variance with each other.  I cannot persuade myself that the lovers of our church are not as able to find effectual ways of reconciling its safety with the franchises of the people as the ecclesiastics of the thirteenth century were able to do; I cannot conceive how anything worse can be said of the Protestant religion of the Church of England than this,—­that, wherever it is judged proper to give it a legal establishment, it becomes necessary to deprive the body of the people, if they adhere to their old opinions, of “their liberties and of all their free customs,” and to reduce them to a state of civil servitude.

There is no man on earth, I believe, more willing than I am to lay it down as a fundamental of the Constitution, that the Church of England should be united and even identified with it; but, allowing this, I cannot allow that all laws of regulation, made from time to time, in support of that fundamental law, are of course equally fundamental and equally unchangeable.  This would be to confound all the branches of legislation and of jurisprudence.  The crown and the personal safety of the monarch are fundamentals in our Constitution:  yet I hope that no man regrets that the rabble of statutes got together during the reign of Henry the Eighth, by which treasons are multiplied with so prolific an energy, have been all repealed in a body; although they were all, or most of them, made in support of things truly fundamental in our Constitution.  So were several of the acts by which the crown exercised its supremacy:  such as the act of Elizabeth for making the high commission courts, and the like; as well as things made treason in the time of Charles the Second.  None of this species of secondary and subsidiary laws have been held fundamental.  They have yielded to circumstances; particularly where they were thought, even in their consequences, or obliquely, to affect other fundamentals.  How much more, certainly, ought they to give way, when, as in our case, they affect, not here and there, in some particular point, or in their consequence, but universally, collectively, and directly, the fundamental franchises of a people equal to the whole inhabitants of several respectable kingdoms and states:  equal to the subjects of the kings of Sardinia or of Denmark; equal to those of the United Netherlands; and more than are to be found in all the states of Switzerland.  This way of proscribing men by whole nations, as it were, from all the benefits of the Constitution to which they were born, I never can believe to be politic or expedient, much less necessary for the existence of any state or church in the world.  Whenever I shall be convinced, which will be late and reluctantly, that the safety of the Church is utterly inconsistent with all the civil rights whatsoever of the far larger part of the inhabitants of our country, I shall be extremely sorry for it; because I shall think the Church to be truly in danger.  It is putting things into the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never will be put.