e
consistent brethren, who waive the Protest; if the former, then, I fear,
your Protest cannot save you.

"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