“But, say you, we have hard measure:  the Quakers are indulged with the liberty denied to us.  They are; and dearly have they earned it.  You have come in (as a sect, at least) in the cool of the evening, at the eleventh hour.  The Quaker character was hardened in the fires of persecution in the seventeenth century,—­not quite to the stake and fagot, but little short of that:  they grew up and thrived against noisome prisons, cruel beatings, whippings, stockings.  They have since endured a century or two of scoffs, contempts; they have been a by-word, and a nay-word; they have stood unmoved:  and the consequence of long conscientious resistance on one part is invariably, in the end, remission on the other.  The legislature, that denied you the tolerance, which I do not know that at that time you even asked, gave them the liberty which, without granting, they would have assumed.  No penalties could have driven them into the churches.  This is the consequence of entire measures.  Had the early Quakers consented to take oaths, leaving a Protest with the clerk of the court against them in the same breath with which they had taken them, do you in your conscience think that they would have been indulged at this day in their exclusive privilege of affirming?  Let your people go on for a century or so, marrying in your own fashion, and I will warrant them, before the end of it, the legislature will be willing to concede to them more than they at present demand.

“Either the institution of marriage depends not for its validity upon hypocritical compliances with the ritual of an alien church, and then I do not see why you cannot marry among yourselves, as the Quakers, without their indulgence, would have been doing to this day,—­or it does depend upon such ritual compliance, and then in your Protests you offend against a divine ordinance.  I have read in the Essex-Street Liturgy a form for the celebration of marriage.  Why is this become a dead letter?  Oh! it has never been legalized:  that is to say, in the law’s eye it is no marriage.  But do you take upon you to say, in the view of the gospel it would be none?  Would your own people, at least, look upon a couple so paired to be none?  But the case of dowries, alimonies, inheritances, etc., which depend for their validity upon the ceremonial of the church by law established,—­are these nothing?  That our children are not legally Filii Nullius,—­is this nothing?  I answer, Nothing; to the preservation of a good conscience, nothing; to a consistent Christianity, less than nothing.  Sad worldly thorns they are indeed, and stumbling-blocks well worthy to be set out of the way by a legislature calling itself Christian; but not likely to be removed in a hurry by any shrewd legislators who perceive that the petitioning complainants have not so much as bruised a shin in the resistance, but, prudently declining the briers and the prickles, nestle quietly down in the smooth two-sided velvet of a Protesting Occasional Conformity.