The Church of Scotland knows as little of Protestantism _undefined_ as the Church of England and Ireland do. She has by the articles of union secured to herself the perpetual establishment of _the Confession of Faith_, and the _Presbyterian_ Church government. In England, even during the troubled interregnum, it was not thought fit to establish a _negative_ religion; but the Parliament settled the _Presbyterian_ as the Church _discipline_, the _Directory_ as the rule of public _worship_, and the _Westminster Catechism_ as the institute of _faith_. This is to show that at no time was the Protestant religion, _undefined_, established here or anywhere else, as I believe. I am sure, that, when the three religions were established in Germany, they were expressly characterized and declared to be the _Evangelic_, the _Reformed_, and the _Catholic_; each of which has its confession of faith and its settled discipline: so that you always may know the best and the worst of them, to enable you to make the most of what is good, and to correct or to qualify or to guard against whatever may seem evil or dangerous. As to the coronation oath, to which you allude, as opposite to admitting a Roman Catholic to the use of any franchise whatsoever, I cannot think that the king would be perjured, if he gave his assent to any regulation which Parliament might think fit to make with regard to that affair. The king is bound by law, as clearly specified in several acts of Parliament, to be in communion with the Church of England. It is a part of the tenure by which he holds his crown; and though no provision was made till the Revolution, which could be called positive and valid in law, to ascertain this great principle, I have always considered it as in fact fundamental, that the king of England should be of the Christian religion, according to the national legal church for the time being. I conceive it was so before the Reformation. Since the Reformation it became doubly necessary; because the king is the head of that church, in some sort an ecclesiastical person,--and it would be incongruous and absurd to have the head of the Church of one faith, and the members of another. The king may _inherit_ the crown as a _Protestant_; but he cannot _hold it_, according to law, without being a Protestant _of the Church of England_. Before we take it for granted that the king is bound by his coronation oath not to admit any of his Catholic subjects to the rights and liberties which ought to belong to them as Englishmen, (not as religionists,) or to settle the conditions or proportions of such admission by an act of Parliament, I wish you to place before your eyes that oath itself, as it is settled in the act of William and Mary.