The latter statute had fallen into complete
disuse, and many of the provisions of the former had been relaxed,
though magistrates in general construed the relaxing enactments as
leaving the relaxations wholly at their discretion to grant or to
withhold, and were very much in the habit of withholding or abridging
them. Other statutes, such as the Test Act, had subsequently been passed
against every sect of Dissenters, though they had only imposed civil
disabilities, and had not inflicted penalties. But the new
Prime-minister was a man to whose disposition anything resembling
persecution was foreign and repugnant. Before his predecessor's unhappy
death he had already discussed with him the propriety of abolishing laws
conceived in such a spirit; and he no sooner found himself at the head
of the government than he prepared a bill to carry out his views. He
drew a distinction between the acts inflicting penalties and those which
only imposed disabilities. With these latter he did not propose to
interfere; but, in July, his colleague, Lord Castlereagh, introduced
into the House of Commons a bill to repeal the Conventicle Act and the
Five Mile Act altogether, and, when it had passed the Commons, he
himself moved its adoption by the Lords, enforcing his recommendation by
the argument, that "an enlarged and liberal toleration was the best
security to the Established Church, a Church not founded on the
exclusion of religious discussion, but, in its homilies, its canons, and
all the principles on which it rested, courting the investigation of the
Scriptures, upon which it founded its doctrines.
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