are sufficiently competent to decide upon, to the motives of
the petitioners, which belong exclusively to the Great Searcher of
Hearts.

We all know that those who loll at their ease in high dignities, whether
of the Church or of the State, are commonly averse to all reformation.
It is hard to persuade them that there can be anything amiss in
establishments which by feeling experience they find to be so very
comfortable. It is as true, that, from the same selfish motives, those
who are struggling upwards are apt to find everything wrong and out of
order. These are truths upon one side and on the other; and neither on
the one side or the other in argument are they worth a single farthing.
I wish, therefore, so much had not been said upon these ill-chosen, and
worse than ill-chosen, these very invidious topics.

I wish still more that the dissensions and animosities which had slept
for a century had not been just now most unseasonably revived. But if we
must be driven, whether we will or not, to recollect these unhappy
transactions, let our memory be complete and equitable, let us recollect
the whole of them together. If the Dissenters, as an honorable gentleman
has described them, have formerly risen from a "whining, canting,
snivelling generation," to be a body dreadful and ruinous to all our
establishments, let him call to mind the follies, the violences, the
outrages, and persecutions, that conjured up, very blamably, but very
naturally, that same spirit of retaliation. Let him recollect, along
with the injuries, the services which Dissenters have done to our Church
and to our State. If they have once destroyed, more than once they have
saved them. This is but common justice, which they and all mankind have
a right to.

There are, Mr. Speaker, besides these prejudices and animosities, which
I would have wholly removed from the debate, things more regularly and
argumentatively urged against the petition, which, however, do not at
all appear to me conclusive.

First, two honorable gentlemen, one near me, the other, I think, on the
other side of the House, assert, that, if you alter her symbols, you
destroy the being of the Church of England. This, for the sake of the
liberty of that Church, I must absolutely deny. The Church, like every
body corporate, may alter her laws without changing her identity. As an
independent church, professing fallibility, she has claimed a right of
acting without the consent of any othe