common good manners, to turn round upon her, and flatly taunt her with
false worship? This language is a little of the strongest in your books
and from your pulpits, though there it may well enough be excused from
religious zeal and the native warmth of Non-Conformity. But at the
altar,--the Church-of-England altar,--adopting her forms, and complying
with her requisitions to the letter,--to be consistent, together with
the practice, I fear, you must drop the language of dissent. You are no
longer sturdy Non-Cons; you are there Occasional Conformists. You submit
to accept the privileges communicated by a form of words exceptionable,
and perhaps justly, in your view; but so submitting, you have no right
to quarrel with the ritual which you have just condescended to owe an
obligation to. They do not force you into their churches. You come
voluntarily, knowing the terms. You marry in the name of the Trinity.
There is no evading this by pretending that you take the formula with
your own interpretation (and so long as you can do this, where is the
necessity of protesting?): for the meaning of a vow is to be settled by
the sense of the imposer, not by any forced construction of the taker:
else might all vows, and oaths too, be eluded with impunity. You marry,
then, essentially as Trinitarians; and the altar no sooner satisfied
than, hey, presto! with the celerity of a juggler, you shift habits, and
proceed pure Unitarians again in the vestry. You cheat the Church out of
a wife, and go home smiling in your sleeves that you have so cunningly
despoiled the Egyptians. In plain English, the Church has married you in
the name of so and so, assuming that you took the words in her sense;
but you outwitted her; you assented to them in your sense only, and took
from her what, upon a right understanding, she would have declined
giving you.

"This is the fair construction to be put upon all Unitarian marriages,
as at present contracted; and so long as you Unitarians could salve your