arry out his views. He
drew a distinction between the acts inflicting penalties and those which
only imposed disabilities. With these latter he did not propose to
interfere; but, in July, his colleague, Lord Castlereagh, introduced
into the House of Commons a bill to repeal the Conventicle Act and the
Five Mile Act altogether, and, when it had passed the Commons, he
himself moved its adoption by the Lords, enforcing his recommendation by
the argument, that "an enlarged and liberal toleration was the best
security to the Established Church, a Church not founded on the
exclusion of religious discussion, but, in its homilies, its canons, and
all the principles on which it rested, courting the investigation of the
Scriptures, upon which it founded its doctrines." At the same time,
while urging the repeal of acts which he truly branded as a disgrace to
the statute-book, he was not blind to the duty imposed on him, as
responsible for the public tranquillity, of taking care that meetings
held ostensibly for purposes of devotion should not be perverted to the
designs of political agitators; and therefore he provided in the bill
for the registration of all places appropriated to religious worship,
and for the exaction from "the preachers and teachers in those meetings
of some test or security in the oaths to be taken by them." He had
already secured the acquiescence of the bishops, and he was equally
successful now in winning the assent of the House. The conditions, such
as they were, did not prevent the bill from being entirely acceptable to
the Non-conformists; and though their spokesman in the House of Commons,
Mr. W. Smith, member for Norwich, confessed a wish "that it had gone a
little farther, and had granted complete religious liberty," he at the
same time expressed sincere gratitude on the part of the Non-conformists
for what was thus done for them; and declared that, "as an act of
toleration, it certainly was the most complete which had hitherto been
passed in this country." It was, in fact, the beginning of the
abandonment of that system of discouragement of and hostility to all
sects except the Established Church, which had hitherto been regarded by
a large party as one of the most essential principles of the
constitution. And as such it makes the year 1812 in some respects a
landmark in our constitutional history.

Mr. Smith had referred to an omission which prevented him from speaking
of the bill as complete. He was