y heart, that this is a bill highly honourable to
the Government, a bill framed on the soundest principles, and evidently
introduced from the best and purest motives. This praise is a tribute
due to Her Majesty's Ministers; and I have great pleasure in paying it.

I have great pleasure also in bearing my testimony to the humanity, the
moderation, and the decorum with which my honourable friend the Member
for the University of Oxford has expressed his sentiments. I must
particularly applaud the resolution which he announced, and to which he
strictly adhered, of treating this question as a question of meum and
tuum, and not as a question of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. With him it is
possible to reason. But how am I to reason with the honourable Member
for Kent, who has made a speech without one fact, one argument, one
shadow of an argument, a speech made up of nothing but vituperation? I
grieve to say that the same bitterness of theological animosity which
characterised that speech may be discerned in too many of the petitions
with which, as he boasts, our table has been heaped day after day. The
honourable Member complains that those petitions have not been treated
with proper respect. Sir, they have been treated with much more respect
than they deserved. He asks why we are to suppose that the petitioners
are not competent to form a judgment on this question? My answer is,
that they have certified their incompetence under their own hands. They
have, with scarcely one exception, treated this question as a question
of divinity, though it is purely a question of property: and when I see
men treat a question of property as if it were a question of divinity, I
am certain that, however numerous they may be, their opinion is entitled
to no consideration. If the persons whom this bill is meant to relieve
are orthodox, that is no reason for our plundering anybody else in
order to enrich them. If they are heretics, that is no reason for our
plundering them in order to enrich others. I should not think myself
justified in supporting this bill, if I could not with truth declare
that, whatever sect had been in possession of these chapels, my conduct
would have been precisely the same. I have no peculiar sympathy with
Unitarians. If these people, instead of being Unitarians, had been Roman
Catholics, or Wesleyan Methodists, or General Baptists, or Particular
Baptists, or members of the Old Secession Church of Scotland, or members
of the