Mr. Lee Keckpresented a Petition from the archdeacon and clergy of the archdeaconry and county of Leicester, setting forth,
"That the archdeacon and clergy aforesaid, take the liberty of stating to the House, that although they have hitherto been passive observers of the growing claims of our Roman Catholic brethren, the period is now arrived when silence might seem to sanction those general claims of freedom from all disabilities, which they beg leave to oppose for the following reasons; viz. that the repeal of the restrictive statutes, graciously intended to pacify the discontents of the Roman Catholics, hath only served to render their discontents less peaceful; that civil privileges awarded to them as the ultimatum of their desires, and, upon their own avowal, as closing the doors of parliament against them, were received with a secret reserve of being only pro hae vice, and have opened a still wider door for future demands: that concessions seem only to have begotten fresh concessions, to be repeated till nothing be left to be conceded, and that in the original formation of a civil government, the Roman Catholics might perhaps demand the allowance of their claims, but in one already formed, and whose constitutional laws are fundamentally hostile to such claim, they can only be granted upon the principle of expediency, and as an experiment which is pregnant with danger to civil and religious liberty, and therefore not to be hazarded; and that the petitioners do not and cannot consider this question in a political view, to the exclusion of religious principles, all the actions of moral agents being in one sense, and that the only guarantee of integrity strictly of a religious nature, not less so in the cabinet than in the church; and that the resistance of the petitioners is not founded merely upon any difference in the creeds of Protestants and Roman Catholics considered in the abstract, but upon the nature of this difference as involving tenets of exclusive salvation, foreign allegiance, and infallibility of ge- 188 neral councils; that the baneful influence of these tenets is not to be ascertained from the exterior of society in Protestant establishments, where the number of Roman Catholics is comparatively small, not in Great Britain, where they are kept in check by the strong arm of Protestant power; but in Popish governments, by the persecutions of all without the pale of their own Church, but exclusive of facts, that their tenets are so incompatible with the civil and religious liberty of our constitution that they cannot harmonize together, there can be no communion of amity and unity between them; and is it to be imagined that the possession of political power will operate as a soporific on tenets always active in self-aggrandizement, and never quiescent unless in a state of compression; and that the petitioners cannot by any casuistry conscientiously pronounce a religion to be corrupt and idolatrous, yet appear to support it; renounce communion with it as erroneous, and yet do any thing that may contribute to the spread of its errors; invest its members with honour and power which may render their example more attractive, without participating in the corruption and idolatry of those who may thus be misled; and that the principles avowed at the Revolution, recognized and interwoven in the very texture of the Coronation Oath ever since, and with most religious firmness adhered to by the father of his people, our most gracious, venerable, and beloved monarch, throughout his very arduous reign, embolden us to hope that no peculiarity of times and circumstances will lead to the removal of those sacred bulwarks by which our ancestors have happily secured the safety of the Church, the throne, and the Protestant community at large; and that however desirious the petitioners may be to conciliate the esteem and prove their charity for their Roman Catholic brethren, by acquiescing in their claims, yet the paramount duty of preserving the existing establishments denies them that satisfaction, and obliges them to declare, in conjunction with the great mass of the Protestant population of the empire, and it is humbly hoped of Protestant Houses of Lords and Commons—Nolumus Leges Angliœ mutari."—Ordered to lie on the table.