TEST-Act, in Law, is the statute 25 Car. II. cap. 2, which directs all officers, civil and military, to take the oaths, and make the declaration against transubstantiation, in the court of King's Bench, or Chancery, the next term, or at the next quarter-sessions, or (by subsequent statutes) within six months after their admission;
and also within the same time to receive the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, according to the usage of the church of England, in some public church, immediately after divine service or sermon, and to deliver into court a certificate thereof signed by the minister and church warden, and also to prove the same by two credible witnesses, upon forfeiture of 500l. and disability to hold the said office.
The avowed object of this act was to exclude from places of trust all members of the church of Rome; and hence the dissenters of that age, if they did not support the bill when passing through the two houses of parliament, gave it no opposition. For this part of their conduct they have been often censured with severity, as having betrayed their rights from resentment to their enemies. But is this a fair state of the case? Were any rights in reality betrayed? That the dread of a popish successor and of popish influence was the immediate and urgent cause of passing the test-act, is indeed true; but that the legislature, when guarding against an impending evil, had not likewise a retrospect to another from which they had so recently been delivered, is not so evident. If it be proper to support an established church as a branch of the constitution, and if the test-act be calculated to afford that support to the church of England, it is probable that the deliberations of parliament were as much influenced by the dread of puritanic fury, and a renewal of the covenant, as by apprehensions of a persecution from a popish king and popish councils. That the members of the church established by law in England had as much reason to dread the effects of power in the hands of Puritans as in the hands of Papists, no impartial man will controvert, who is not a stranger to that period of our national history; and that it was the duty of the legislature by every method in their power to provide for the security of the constitution against the machinations of both its enemies, will be admitted by all but such as are in love with anarchy on the one hand, or with despotism on the other.
Many people, when they talk or write of the test-act, seem to think that it was framed in opposition to the religious opinions of the church of Rome; and finding the Protestant dissenters, who abhor these opinions, deprived by it of their civil rights, they speak with indignation of a law which confounds the innocent with the guilty. But all this proceeds from a palpable mistake of the purpose of the test. As the legislature had no authority to make laws against any opinions whatever, on account of their being false in theology; so it is not to be supposed that, in their deliberations on the TEST-act, the members of that august body took into their consideration the comparative orthodoxy of the distinguishing tenets of the Catholics and Puritans. As a religious test they might esteem the latter much more than the former; but if they found that both had combined with their theological doctrines opinions respecting civil and ecclesiastical government, inconsistent with the fundamental principles of the English constitution, they had an undoubted right to enact a law, by which none should be admitted to offices, in the execution of which they could injure the constitution, without previously giving security that their administration should support it in all its branches. It had not then been doubted, nor is there reason to doubt yet, but that an established religion is necessary, in conjunction with civil government