“Hard and grievous it is, that, in any case, an institution so broad and general as the union of man and wife should be so cramped and straitened by the hands of an imposing hierarchy, that, to plight troth to a lovely woman, a man must be necessitated to compromise his truth and faith to Heaven; but so it must be, so long as you choose to marry by the forms of the church over which that hierarchy presides.

“‘Therefore,’ say you, ‘we protest.’  O poor and much fallen word, Protest!  It was not so that the first heroic reformers protested.  They departed out of Babylon once for good and all; they came not back for an occasional contact with her altars—­a dallying, and then a protesting against dalliance; they stood not shuffling in the porch, with a Popish foot within, and its lame Lutheran fellow without, halting betwixt.  These were the true Protestants.  You are—­Protesters.

“Besides the inconsistency of this proceeding, I must think it a piece of impertinence, unseasonable at least, and out of place, to obtrude these papers upon the officiating clergyman,—­to offer to a public functionary an instrument which by the tenor of his function he is not obliged to accept, but, rather, he is called upon to reject.  Is it done in his clerical capacity?  He has no power of redressing the grievance.  It is to take the benefit of his ministry, and then insult him.  If in his capacity of fellow-Christian only, what are your scruples to him, so long as you yourselves are able to get over them, and do get over them by the very fact of coming to require his services?  The thing you call a Protest might with just as good a reason be presented to the church-warden for the time being, to the parish-clerk, or the pew-opener.

“The Parliament alone can redress your grievance, if any.  Yet I see not how with any grace your people can petition for relief, so long as, by the very fact of your coming to church to be married, they do bona fide and strictly relieve themselves.  The Upper House, in particular, is not unused to these same things called Protests, among themselves.  But how would this honorable body stare to find a noble Lord conceding a measure, and in the next breath, by a solemn Protest, disowning it!  A Protest there is a reason given for non-compliance, not a subterfuge for an equivocal occasional compliance.  It was reasonable in the primitive Christians to avert from their persons, by whatever lawful means, the compulsory eating of meats which had been offered unto idols.  I dare say the Roman Prefects and Exarchates had plenty of petitioning in their days.  But what would a Festus or Agrippa have replied to a petition to that effect, presented to him by some evasive Laodicean, with the very meat between his teeth, which he had been chewing voluntarily rather than abide the penalty?  Relief for tender consciences means nothing, where the conscience has previously relieved itself,—­that is, has complied with the injunctions which it seeks preposterously to be rid of.  Relief for conscience there is properly none, but what by better information makes an act appear innocent and lawful with which the previous conscience was not satisfied to comply.  All else is but relief from penalties, from scandal incurred by a complying practice, where the conscience itself is not fully satisfied.