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The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria cover

The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria

Chapter 403: MOTION RESPECTING THE CORPORATION AND TEST ACTS, ETC.
By Edward Farr
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The volume traces British political, parliamentary, and military developments from the accession of George III through the early nineteenth century, chronicling changes of ministry and cabinet, debates over colonial taxation and the American conflict, parliamentary controversies involving figures such as Wilkes and Warren Hastings, questions of Catholic relief and slave-trade abolition, and responses to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, including major naval and continental campaigns, the union with Ireland, and domestic legislation on finance, civil liberties, and parliamentary reform.

MOTION RESPECTING THE CORPORATION AND TEST ACTS, ETC.

On the 8th of May Mr. Beaufoy again moved the repeal of the corporation and test acts; being prompted thereto, he said, by the confidence which the dissenters reposed in the disposition of the house to do justice to the injured, and to afford relief to the oppressed. This motion was warmly supported by Fox, who laid it down as an axiom of policy, that no human government had any jurisdiction over opinions as such, and more especially over religious opinions. Fox supported this view by weighty arguments; but the motion was opposed by Pitt on the same ground as before; and on a division it was lost by one hundred and twenty-two against one hundred and two. On a subsequent clay, Lord Stanhope introduced a bill into the house of peers for relieving all nonconformists from the operation of the penal laws, and allowing them free exercise of their faith in preaching and writing; papists only being excepted on account of their persecuting spirit. Lord Stanhope denounced these penal laws as a disgrace to our statute-books; but the motion was opposed by Dr. Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the whole bench of bishops, as tending to unloose the bonds of society, by substituting fanaticism for religious order and subordination, by opening a door to licentiousness and contempt of Christianity, under pretence of religious liberty; and as destructive to the Church of England and the constitution, of which that church was a firm support. The bill was rejected on the second reading; and another, which was shortly after brought in by the same noble lord, to prevent suits in the ecclesiastical courts for the recovery of tithes, shared the same fate.