§ A Petition of the Protestant Dissenters and other Protestants, friends to religious liberty, residing in Berwick-upon-Tweed and its vicinity, was presented and read; setting forth,
§ "That they consider it as the natural and undoubted right of all men to worship God according to the light of their own 706 consciences, and, after a diligent and impartial examination of the Sacred Volume, to embrace and avow what they conceive to be the truth; and that, in the exercise of these invaluable rights, they ought not to be opposed by any law subjecting those who dissent from the mode of worship of the Established Church to any corporal or pecuniary punishments, as man is accountable to God alone for his religious sentiments; and that, by the wisdom of parliament, and the liberal disposition of the sovereign, the petitioners acknowledge, with peculiar pleasure and gratitude, various laws, which tended to the subversion and violation of those rights, have been repealed; yet they still observe, with a mixture of pain and apprehension, that other laws, no less inimical to those rights, remain on the statute book, by which Dissenters of every denomination from the Church of England are subjected to heavy fines and corporal punishments; therefore the petitioners, though they yield to none in loyalty to their king, and love to their country, yet feel it to be a duty they owe not only to themselves but to posterity to remonstrate respectfully, but at the same time earnestly, against the longer duration of those laws which they consider as an infringement of religious liberty, and humbly petition the House, that all such laws may be speedily rescinded, and that every subject of the United Kingdom may be allowed to worship God as he pleases, under his own vine and fig-tree, without any thing to make him afraid."
§ Ordered to lie upon the table.