Chapter 22: Subscription to Articles of Religion - William Paley, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy [1785]
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The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, Foreword by D.L. Le Mahieu (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002).
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Chapter 22
Subscription to Articles of Religion
Subscription to articles of religion, though no more than a declaration of the subscriber’s assent, may properly enough be considered in connexion with the subject of oaths, because it is governed by the same rule of interpretation:
Which rule is the animus imponentis.
The inquiry, therefore, concerning subscription will be, quis imposuit, et quo animo?
The bishop who receives the subscription, is not the imposer, any more than the crier of a court, who administers the oath to the jury and witnesses, is the person that imposes it; nor, consequently, is the private opinion or interpretation of the bishop of any signification to the subscriber, one way or other.
The compilers of the Thirty-nine Articles are not to be considered as the imposers of subscription, any more than the framer or drawer up of a law is the person that enacts it.
The legislature of the 13th Eliz. is the imposer, whose intention the subscriber is bound to satisfy.
They who contend, that nothing less can justify subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles, than the actual belief of each and every separate proposition contained in them, must suppose, that the legislature expected the consent of ten thousand men, and that in perpetual succession, not to one controverted proposition, but to many hundreds. It is difficult to conceive how this could be expected by any, who observed the incurable diversity of human opinion upon all subjects short of demonstration.
If the authors of the law did not intend this, what did they intend?
They intended to exclude from offices in the church,
1. All abettors of popery.
2. Anabaptists; who were at that time a powerful party on the Continent.
3. The Puritans; who were hostile to an episcopal constitution: and in general the members of such leading sects or foreign establishments as threatened to overthrow our own.
Whoever finds himself comprehended within these descriptions, ought not to subscribe. Nor can a subscriber to the Articles take advantage of any latitude which our rule may seem to allow, who is not first convinced that he is truly and substantially satisfying the intention of the legislature.
During the present state of ecclesiastical patronage, in which private individuals are permitted to impose teachers upon parishes with which they are often little or not at all connected, some limitation of the patron’s choice may be necessary to prevent unedifying contentions between neighbouring teachers, or between the teachers and their respective congregations. But this danger, if it exist, may be provided against with equal effect, by converting the articles of faith into articles of peace.
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