on-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 mor