principle, I am totally averse, it is persecution for conscientious
difference in opinion. If these gentlemen complained justly of any
compulsion upon them on that article, I would hardly wait for their
petitions; as soon as I knew the evil, I would haste to the cure; I
would even run before their complaints.

I will not enter into the abstract merits of our Articles and Liturgy.
Perhaps there are some things in them which one would wish had not been
there. They are not without the marks and characters of human frailty.

But it is not human frailty and imperfection, and even a considerable
degree of them, that becomes a ground for your alteration; for by no
alteration will you get rid of those errors, however you may delight
yourselves in varying to infinity the fashion of them. But the ground
for a legislative alteration of a legal establishment is this, and this
only,--that you find the inclinations of the majority of the people,
concurring with your own sense of the intolerable nature of the abuse,
are in favor of a change.

If this be the case in the present instance, certainly you ought to make
the alteration that is proposed, to satisfy your own consciences, and to
give content to your people. But if you have no evidence of this nature,
it ill becomes your gravity, on the petition of a few gentlemen, to
listen to anything that tends to shake one of the capital pillars of the
state, and alarm the body of your people upon that one ground, in which
every hope and fear, every interest, passion, prejudice, everything
which can affect the human breast, are all involved together. If you
make this a season for religious alterations, depend upon it, you will
soon find it a season of religious tumults and religious wars.

These gentlemen complain of hardship. No considerable number shows
discontent; but, in order to give satisfaction to any number of
respectable men, who come in so decent and constitutional a mode before
us, let us examine a little what that hardship is. They want to be
preferred clergymen in the Church of England as by law established; but
their consciences will not suffer them to conform to the doctrines and
practices of that Church: that is, they want to be teachers in a church
to which they do not belong; and it is an odd sort of hardship. They
want to receive the emoluments appropriated for teaching one set of
doctrines, whilst they are teaching another. A church, in any legal
sense, is only a cert