truth we are resisting a change. The question
really is, not whether we shall remove old tests, but whether we shall
impose new ones. The law which we seek to repeal has long been obsolete.
So completely have the tests been disused that, only the other day, the
right honourable Baronet, the Secretary for the Home Department,
when speaking in favour of the Irish Colleges Bill, told us that the
Government was not making a rash experiment. "Our plan," he said, "has
already been tried at Edinburgh and has succeeded. At Edinburgh the
tests have been disused near a hundred years." As to Glasgow the
gentlemen opposite can give us full information from their own
experience. For there are at least three members of the Cabinet who have
been Lords Rectors; the First Lord of the Treasury, and the Secretaries
for the Home Department and the Colonial Department. They never took
the test. They probably would not have taken it; for they are all
Episcopalians. In fact, they belong to the very class which the test
was especially meant to exclude. The test was not meant to exclude
Presbyterian dissenters; for the Presbyterian Church was not yet rent
by any serious schism. Nor was the test meant to exclude the Roman
Catholics; for against the Roman Catholics there was already abundant
security. The Protestant Episcopalian was the enemy against whom it was,
in 1707, thought peculiarly necessary to take precautions. That those
precautions have long been disused the three members of the Cabinet whom
I mentioned can certify.

On a sudden the law, which had long slept a deep sleep, has been
awakened, stirred up, and put into vigorous action. These obsolete tests
are now, it seems, to be exacted with severity. And why? Simply because
an event has taken place which makes them ten times as unjust and
oppressive as they would have been formerly. They were not required
while the Established Church was the Church of the majority. They are
to be required solely because a secession has taken place which has made
the Established Church the Church of the minority. While they could have
done little mischief they were suffered to lie neglected. They are now
to be used, because a time has come at which they cannot be used without
fatal consequences.

It is impossible for me to speak without indignation of those who have
taken the lead in the work of persecution. Yet I must give them credit
for courage. They have selected as their object of attack no less