demanded,) "because we are thereby called upon not only tacitly to acquiesce, but to profess a belief, in a doctrine which is a dogma, as we believe, totally unfounded." But do you profess that belief during the ceremony? or are you only called upon for the profession, but do not make it? If the latter, then you fall in with the rest of your more consistent brethren who waive the protest; if the former, then, I fear, your protest cannot save you.

Hard and grievous it is, that, in any case, an institution so broad and general as the union of man and wife should be so cramped and straitened by the hands of an imposing hierarchy, that, to plight troth to a lovely woman, a man must be necessitated to compromise his truth and faith to Heaven; but so it must be, so long as you choose to marry by the forms of the Church over which that hierarchy presides.

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Therefore," say you, "we protest." Oh poor and much-fallen word, Protest! It was not so that the first heroic reformers protested. They departed out of Babylon once for good and all; they came not back for an occasional contact with her altars, -a dallying, and then a protesting against dalliance; they stood not shuffling in the porch, with a Popish foot within, and its lame Lutheran fellow without, halting betwixt. These were the true Protestants. You are-protesters.

Besides the inconsistency of this proceeding, I must think it a piece of impertinence, unseasonable at least, and out of place, to obtrude these papers upon the officiating clergyman; to offer to a public functionary an instrument which by the tenour of his function he is not obliged to accept, but rather he is called upon to reject. Is it done in his clerical capacity? He has no power of redressing the grievance. It is to take the benefit of his ministry, and then insult him. If in his capacity of fellow

Christian only, what are your scruples to him, so long as you yourselves are able to get over them, and do get over them by coming to require his services? The thing you call a Protest might with just as good a reason be presented to the church-warden for the time being, to the parish clerk, or the pew-opener. The Parliament alone can redress your grievance, if any. Yet I see not how with any grace your people can petition for relief, so long as, by the very fact of your coming to church to be married, they do bona fide and strictly relieve themselves. The Upper House, in particular, is not unused to these same things, called Protests, among themselves. But how would this honourable body stare to find a noble lord conceding a measure, and in the next breath, by a solemn protest, disowning it! In a protest there is a reason given for non-compliance, not a subterfuge for an equivocal occasional compliance. It was reasonable in the primitive Christians to avert from their persons, by whatever lawful means, the compulsory eating of meats which had been offered unto idols. I dare say the Roman prefects and exarchates had plenty of petitioning in their days. But what would a Festus or Agrippa have replied to a petition to that effect, presented to him by some evasive Laodicean, with the very meat between his teeth, which he had been chewing voluntarily, rather than abide the penalty? Relief for tender consciences means nothing, where the conscience has previously relieved itself; that is, has complied with the injunctions which it seeks preposterously to be rid of. Relief for conscience there is properly none but what by better information makes an act appear innocent and lawful with which the previous conscience was not satisfied to comply. All else is but relief from penalties, from scandal incurred by a complying practice, where the conscience itself is not fully satisfied.

"But," say you, "we have hard measure: the Quakers are indulged with the liberty denied to us." They are; and dearly have they earned it. You have come in (as a sect at least) in the cool of the evening, at the eleventh hour. The Quaker character was hardened in the fires of persecution in the seventeenth century; not quite to the stake and fagot, but little short of that: they grew up and thrived against noisome prisons, cruel beatings, whippings, stockings. They have since endured a century or two of scoffs, contempts; they have been a by-word and a nay-word; they have stood unmoved: and the consequence of long conscientious resistance on one part is invariably, in the end, remission on the other. The legislature, that denied you the tolerance, which I do not know that at that time you even asked, gave them the liberty, which, without granting, they would have assumed. No penalties could have driven them into the churches. This is the consequence of entire measures. Had the early Quakers consented to take oaths, leaving a protest with the clerk of the court against them in the same breath with which they had taken them, do you in your conscience think that they would have been indulged at this day in their exclusive privilege of affirming? Let your people go on for a century or so, marrying in your own fashion, and I will warrant them, before the end of it, the legislature will be willing to concede to them more than they at present demand.

Either the institution of marriage depends not for its validity upon hypocritical compliances with the ritual of an alien Church, (and then I do not see why you cannot marry among yourselves, as the Quakers, without their indulgence, would have been doing to this day,) or it does depend upon such ritual compliance. And then, in your protests, you offend against a divine ordinance. I have read in

H

the Essex Street Liturgy a form for the celebration of marriage. Why is this become a dead letter? Oh! it has never been legalized; that is to say,' in the law's eye, it is no marriage. But do you take

upon you to say, in the view of the gospel it would be none? Would your own people, at least, look upon a couple so paired to be none? But the case of dowries, alimonies, inheritances, &c., which depend for their validity upon the ceremonial of the Church by law established, are these nothing? That our children are not legally Filii Nullius,—is this nothing? I answer, Nothing; to the preservation of a good conscience, nothing; to a consistent Christianity, less than nothing. Sad worldly thorns they are indeed, and stumbling-blocks well worthy to be set out of the way by a legislature calling itself Christian; but not likely to be removed in a hurry by any shrewd legislators who perceive that the petitioning complainants have not so much as bruised a shin in the resistance, but, prudently declining the briers and the prickles, nestle quietly down in the smooth two-sided velvet of a protesting occasional conformity.

I am, dear sir,

With much respect, yours, &c.,

ELIA.

ON

THE CUSTOM OF HISSING AT THE

THEATRES;

WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF A CLUB OF DAMNED AUTHORS.

MR. REFLECTOR,-I am one of those persons whom the world has thought proper to designate by the title of Damned Authors. In that memorable season of dramatic failures, 1806-7,-in which no fewer, I think, than two tragedies, four comedies, one opera, and three farces, suffered at Drury-Lane Theatre, I was found guilty of constructing an afterpiece, and was damned.

Against the decision of the public in such instances there can be no appeal. The clerk of Chatham might as well have protested against the decision of Cade and his followers, who were then the public. Like him, I was condemned because I could write.

Not but it did appear to some of us that the measures of the popular tribunal at that period savoured a little of harshness and of the summum jus. The public mouth was early in the season fleshed upon the "Vindictive Man," and some pieces of that nature; and it retained, through the remainder of it, a relish of blood. As Dr. Johnson would have said, Sir, there was a habit of sibilation in the house."

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Still less am I disposed to inquire into the reason of the comparative lenity, on the other hand, with

* From the Reflector, No. 3.