which has been thrown upon these marriages can be justified; the particular exemptions rest on particular grounds: and whether the Marriage Act be regarded as a matter merely of civil regulation and policy, or, as is by some maintained, an act of religious restraint, the wisdom and justice of the exceptions are approved by the peculiar character and circumstances of the parties excepted, of which the courts might require the exhibition of proof, under any suspicion of a fraudulent evasion of the law.

It would be the excess of absurdity to require the Jew to conform with the Christian ritual: the administration of no Christian offices can be supposed to have an influence upon his conscience, or to excite in him any feelings but those of exasperated prejudice. The ritual of the English Church must be especially offensive to a Jew, who denies the mystical union between Christ and the Christian Church, represented in marriage; who can be bound by no engagement contracted in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; who can receive no instruction in the duties of marriage upon the authority of the apostles. It would have been vain to insist on such impracticable and nugatory conformity: and at the same time there was no civil danger in making the exception. The Jews are altogether a distinct and peculiar people: their manners cannot be counterfeited or assumed. The rabbi knows who is and who is not a Jew, and there was no reason to apprehend that he would celebrate marriage with any who were not of the Jewish persuasion. There was also an ancient ritual

peculiar to the Jews, and from their care in the preservation of pedigree there was no doubt of a sufficient record of every thing connected with their marriages.

The exemption of the Quakers was equally proper and expedient. The Quakers are also an isolated body; less zealous than any other sect of making or receiving proselytes; disposed to excommunicate any of their own body who may marry out of the communion of the Friends; and securing the identity of their several members by the practice of giving and demanding certificates on any removal of a member from one part of the kingdom to auother. The exemption of Quakers was therefore an exemption of Quakers exclusively it was an exemption not liable to abuse: there was no danger of its fraudulent extension. The Quakers also have a formulary of marriage, peculiar to themselves, celebrated in the face of their congregations, and duly attested. Experience of their pertinacious adherence to their own manners had shewn, that to require the Quakers to conform with the ritual of the Church would have been equivalent to an interdiction of their marriages, and a dissolution of their body.

In these two cases of exemption it was required that the man and the woman should both be Quakers or Jews. If one only was a Quaker or a Jew, the ritual of the Church was not to be dispensed with. There is another class of Christians whose religious feelings and discipline were particularly opposed by the Marriage Act, and if it had been the design of the legislature in that Act not to impose a burthen

upon conscience, the case of the Roman Catholics could not have been overlooked. They professed no agreement in the doctrines of the English Church. They, more than any other Christian body, had reason to complain, if the Marriage Act was an innovation upon any privileges previously possessed by nonconformists. They are taught to consider marriage as a sacrament, which none but a Romish priest is competent to administer. Although therefore in England the civil benefits of marriage cannot be obtained without a conformity with the ritual, it is to the Romanist nothing but a form; and it is distressing, that under any circumstances a religious administration should be nothing but a form. To the Romanist it is worse than a form: it is an heretical administration, exciting the worst of all feelings, a feeling of religious antipathy. Nor is it an unimportant consideration, that the Protestant Church admits the validity of all Catholic administrations, the reality of Catholic orders, and that before the Reformation, and under the æra of the common law, it was the Catholic priest alone whose administration could confer the requisite validity upon marriage. There can be no doubt therefore of the competence of the Catholic priest; and in Ireland the Catholic priest, as well as the dissenting minister, is legally authorized to celebrate marriage between the members of his own communion. In Ireland the Irish Catholic peasantry may be lawfully married by the Catholic priest; but in England the Irish labourers, not aware of the variations of the law in the two countries, apply to the priest, who has the imprudence to marry them, and their

marriage is not good in law. They nevertheless deem themselves married, but their marriage, however it may bind the conscience, has no legal validity without the interposition of the office of the established Church. This is a state of law than which nothing, since the recent revision of the Marriage Act, is more revolting to a religious mind. But the case admits of yet further aggravation. By a late law, the Irish poor, being destitute of relief, are liable to be removed to their own country, by a summary process, and the cruel operation of the law is thus consummated. The parents, being Irish, may be removed; the children, being illegitimate, the offspring of an illicit intercourse, or illegal marriage, cannot be removed, but have a legal settlement in the parish in which they were born, and are separated from their natural parents. Such practical injustice demands immediate redress, by restricting under a penalty the administration of the Catholic priest, without the certificate of a previous marriage according to the forms of the established Church, or by the simpler and more generous process of a legal recognition of the validity of marriages celebrated by a Catholic priest, where both parties are known to be Catholics. This concession would not prejudice the great principle of the religious ratification of marriage.

It has been now seen, that the perfect validity of marriage has always been dependent on the administration of a person in orders; that marriages contracted without the religious ratification were not valid before the Toleration Act; that the Toleration Act did not render them valid; that their validity

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was not approved in the interval between the Toleration Act and the Marriage Act; that the Marriage Act did not therefore render them invalid; and that the only exceptions under that Act were of a peculiar cast and character. The grievance therefore recently alleged by the Unitarians and by the Freethinking Christians, and their petition for redress, must rest upon their own ground, viz. " that the marriage service required by the existing law is inconsistent in several points with the religious belief which the petitioners conscientiously entertain," and that "toleration is in their case necessarily incomplete while they are obliged by the marriage law to join in a service repugnant in many parts to their religious feelings and principles." This is the general statement of their case: the particular objections of the Unitarians, or rather of the Freethinking Christians, are more distinctly exhibited in various protests against the use of the ritual. The substance of these objections is,

1. That it makes marriage a religious instead of a civil act, and that submission to a ceremony performed by a person in holy orders, or pretended holy orders, is painful and humiliating to the feelings of persons knowing nothing of a priesthood in Christianity.

2. That parts of the service are highly indelicate and offensive.

3. That it requires the man to worship the woman. 4. That it implies a recognition of the doctrine of the Trinity.

See Appendix, No. II.