vers 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energy, have been all repealed in a body; although they were all, or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 th