Antwerp, and the amorous violence which awaits Mrs. Plymley?



LETTER V.



Dear Abraham,--I never met a parson in my life who did not consider
the Corporation and Test Acts as the great bulwarks of the Church;
and yet it is now just sixty-four years since bills of indemnity to
destroy their penal effects, or, in other words, to repeal them,
have been passed annually as a matter of course.


Heu vatum ignar mentes.


These bulwarks, without which no clergyman thinks he could sleep
with his accustomed soundness, have actually not been in existence
since any man now living has taken holy orders. Every year the
Indemnity Act pardons past breaches of these two laws, and prevents
any fresh actions of informers from coming to a conclusion before
the period for the next indemnity bill arrives; so that these
penalties, by which alone the Church remains in existence, have not
had one moment's operation for sixty-four years. You will say the
legislature, during the whole of this period, has reserved to itself
the discretion of suspending or not suspending. But had not the
legislature the right of re-enacting, if it was necessary? And now
when you have kept the rod over these people (with the most