This language is a little of the strongest in your books and from your pulpits, though there it may well enough be excused from religious zeal and the native warmth of Non-Conformity.  But at the altar,—­the Church-of-England altar,—­adopting her forms, and complying with her requisitions to the letter,—­to be consistent, together with the practice, I fear, you must drop the language of dissent.  You are no longer sturdy Non-Cons; you are there Occasional Conformists.  You submit to accept the privileges communicated by a form of words exceptionable, and perhaps justly, in your view; but so submitting, you have no right to quarrel with the ritual which you have just condescended to owe an obligation to.  They do not force you into their churches.  You come voluntarily, knowing the terms.  You marry in the name of the Trinity.  There is no evading this by pretending that you take the formula with your own interpretation (and so long as you can do this, where is the necessity of protesting?):  for the meaning of a vow is to be settled by the sense of the imposer, not by any forced construction of the taker:  else might all vows, and oaths too, be eluded with impunity.  You marry, then, essentially as Trinitarians; and the altar no sooner satisfied than, hey, presto! with the celerity of a juggler, you shift habits, and proceed pure Unitarians again in the vestry.  You cheat the Church out of a wife, and go home smiling in your sleeves that you have so cunningly despoiled the Egyptians.  In plain English, the Church has married you in the name of so and so, assuming that you took the words in her sense; but you outwitted her; you assented to them in your sense only, and took from her what, upon a right understanding, she would have declined giving you.

“This is the fair construction to be put upon all Unitarian marriages, as at present contracted; and so long as you Unitarians could salve your consciences with the equivoque, I do not see why the Established Church should have troubled herself at all about the matter.  But the Protesters necessarily see further.  They have some glimmerings of the deception; they apprehend a flaw somewhere; they would fain be honest, and yet they must marry notwithstanding; for honesty’s sake, they are fain to dehonestate themselves a little.  Let me try the very words of your own Protest, to see what confessions we can pick out of them.

“‘As Unitarians, therefore, we’ (you and your newly espoused bride) ‘most solemnly protest against the service,’ (which yourselves have just demanded,) ’because we are thereby called upon, not only tacitly to acquiesce, but to profess a belief, in a doctrine which is a dogma, as we believe, totally unfounded.’  But do you profess that belief during the ceremony? or are you only called upon for the profession, but do not make it?  If the latter, then you fall in with the rest of your more consistent brethren, who waive the Protest; if the former, then, I fear, your Protest cannot save you.