It is the
first article of Magna Charta, "that the Church of England shall be
free," &c, &c. But at that period, churchmen and barons and knights took
care of the franchises and free customs of the people, too. Those
franchises are part of the Constitution itself, and inseparable from it.
It would be a very strange thing, if there should not only exist
anomalies in our laws, a thing not easy to prevent, but that the
fundamental parts of the Constitution should be perpetually and
irreconcilably at variance with each other. I cannot persuade myself
that the lovers of our church are not as able to find effectual ways of
reconciling its safety with the franchises of the people as the
ecclesiastics of the thirteenth century were able to do; I cannot
conceive how anything worse can be said of the Protestant religion of
the Church of England than this,--that, wherever it is judged proper to
give it a legal establishment, it becomes necessary to deprive the body
of the people, if they adhere to their old opinions, of "their liberties
and of all their free customs," and to reduce them to a state of _civil_
servitude.
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