white another. I have
not been in one year a Protestant master of the rolls, and in the next
a Catholic lord-chancellor. I would rather remain as I am, the
humble member for Plympton, than be guilty of such apostasy;
such contradiction; such unexplainable conversion; such miserable,
contemptible, apostasy." As for the bill itself, Sir Charles stated,
that when it was dissected and anatomized, it destroyed itself. It
admitted the danger, and yet provided no security for Protestants. He
would not have condescended to stultify himself by the composition of
such a bill. The folly and contradictions be upon the heads of those who
drew it. They might have turned him out of office; but he would not be
made such a dirty tool as to draw that bill. "Let who would, he would
no-t defile pen, or waste paper, by such an act of folly, and forfeit
his character for common sense and honesty."

This attack of the attorney-general called up Mr. Peel, who closed the
debate. After complaining of the violence of his colleague, he reverted
to the grounds on which he had first proposed the bill; again urging
the state of Ireland, and the absolute necessity of doing something; the
inability of his opponents to do anything better, though they vehemently
opposed the measure now offered; the impossibility of any government
standing which should set itself on avowed principles against
concession; and the folly of treating the question as one which had any
connexion with religion. The Catholics were never excluded at any time
because of their religious creed; they were excluded for a supposed
deficiency of civil worth, and the religious test was applied to
them, not to detect the worship of saints, or any other tenet of their
religion, but as a test to discover whether they were Roman Catholics.
It was a test to discover the bad, intriguing subject, not the
religionist; and, therefore, when he parted with the declaration against
transubstantiation, it was not from any doubt which he entertained as to
the doctrines of the Roman Catholics, but from looking at it as a test
of exclusion, and from thinking that, when the exclusion was deemed
unnecessary, the test of exclusion, might be dispensed with. Mr. Peel
complained grievously that an unfair application had been made of his
unhappy phrase, that the proposed measure would be "a breaking in upon
the constitution of 1688." He meant no more, he said, than that there
would be an alteration in the words