of
our policy to prevent.

The act never meant, I am sure, any such unnatural restraint on the
joint legislature it was then forming. History shows us what it meant,
and all that it could mean with any degree of common sense.

In the reign of Charles the First a violent and ill-considered attempt
was made unjustly to establish the platform of the government and the
rites of the Church of England in Scotland, contrary to the genius and
desires of far the majority of that nation. This usurpation excited a
most mutinous spirit in that country. It produced that shocking
fanatical Covenant (I mean the Covenant of '36) for forcing their ideas
of religion on England, and indeed on all mankind. This became the
occasion, at length, of other covenants, and of a Scotch army marching
into England to fulfil them; and the Parliament of England (for its own
purposes) adopted their scheme, took their last covenant, and destroyed
the Church of England. The Parliament, in their ordinance of 1648,
expressly assign their desire of conforming to the Church of Scotland as
a motive for their alteration.

To prevent such violent enterprises on the one side or on the other,
since each Church was going to be disarmed of a legislature wholly and
peculiarly affected to it, and lest this new uniformity in the State
should be urged as a reason and ground of ecclesiastical uniformity, the
Act of Union provided that presbytery should continue the Scotch, as
episcopacy the English establishment, and that this separate and
mutually independent Church-government was to be considered as a part of
the Union, without aiming at putting the regulation within each Church
out of its own power, without putting both Churches out of the power of
the State. It could not mean to forbid us to set anything ecclesiastical
in order, but at the expense of tearing up all foundations, and
forfeiting the inestimable benefits (for inestimable they are) which we
derive from the happy union of the two kingdoms. To suppose otherwise is
to suppose that the act intended we could not meddle at all with the
Church, but we must as a preliminary destroy the State.

Well, then, Sir, this is, I hope, satisfactory. The Act of Union does
not stand in our way. But, Sir, gentlemen think we are not competent to
the reformation desired, chiefly from our want of theological learning.
If we were the legal assembly....

If ever there was anything to which, from reason, nature, habit, and