consciences with the _équivoque_, I do not see why the Established
Church should have troubled herself at all about the matter. But the
Protesters necessarily see further. They have some glimmerings of the
deception; they apprehend a flaw somewhere; they would fain be honest,
and yet they must marry notwithstanding; for honesty's sake, they are
fain to dehonestate themselves a little. Let me try the very words of
your own Protest, to see what confessions we can pick out of them.

"'As Unitarians, therefore, we' (you and your newly espoused bride)
'most solemnly protest against the service,' (which yourselves have just
demanded,) 'because we are thereby called upon, not only tacitly to
acquiesce, but to profess a belief, in a doctrine which is a dogma, as
we believe, totally unfounded.' But do you profess that belief during
the ceremony? or are you only called upon for the profession, but do not
make it? If the latter, then you fall in with the rest of your more
consistent brethren, who waive the Protest; if the former, then, I fear,
your Protest cannot save you.

"Hard and grievous it is, that, in any case, an institution so broad
and general as the union of man and wife should be so cramped and
straitened by the hands of an imposing hierarchy, that, to plight troth
to a lovely woman, a man must be necessitated to compromise his truth
and faith to Heaven; but so it must be, so long as you choose to marry
by the forms of the church over which that hierarchy presides.

"'Therefore,' say you, 'we protest.' O poor and much fallen word,
Protest! It was not so that the first heroic reformers protested. They
departed out of Babylon once for good and all; they came not back for an
occasional contact with her altars--a dallying, and then a protesting
against dalliance; they stood not shuffling in the porch, with a Popish