The latter statute had fallen into complete disuse, and many of the provisions of the former had been relaxed, though magistrates in general construed the relaxing enactments as leaving the relaxations wholly at their discretion to grant or to withhold, and were very much in the habit of withholding or abridging them.  Other statutes, such as the Test Act, had subsequently been passed against every sect of Dissenters, though they had only imposed civil disabilities, and had not inflicted penalties.  But the new Prime-minister was a man to whose disposition anything resembling persecution was foreign and repugnant.  Before his predecessor’s unhappy death he had already discussed with him the propriety of abolishing laws conceived in such a spirit; and he no sooner found himself at the head of the government than he prepared a bill to carry out his views.  He drew a distinction between the acts inflicting penalties and those which only imposed disabilities.  With these latter he did not propose to interfere; but, in July, his colleague, Lord Castlereagh, introduced into the House of Commons a bill to repeal the Conventicle Act and the Five Mile Act altogether, and, when it had passed the Commons, he himself moved its adoption by the Lords, enforcing his recommendation by the argument, that “an enlarged and liberal toleration was the best security to the Established Church, a Church not founded on the exclusion of religious discussion, but, in its homilies, its canons, and all the principles on which it rested, courting the investigation of the Scriptures, upon which it founded its doctrines.”  At the same time, while urging the repeal of acts which he truly branded as a disgrace to the statute-book, he was not blind to the duty imposed on him, as responsible for the public tranquillity, of taking care that meetings held ostensibly for purposes of devotion should not be perverted to the designs of political agitators; and therefore he provided in the bill for the registration of all places appropriated to religious worship, and for the exaction from “the preachers and teachers in those meetings of some test or security in the oaths to be taken by them.”  He had already secured the acquiescence of the bishops, and he was equally successful now in winning the assent of the House.  The conditions, such as they were, did not prevent the bill from being entirely acceptable to the Non-conformists; and though their spokesman in the House of Commons, Mr. W. Smith, member for Norwich, confessed a wish “that it had gone a little farther, and had granted complete religious liberty,” he at the same time expressed sincere gratitude on the part of the Non-conformists for what was thus done for them; and declared that, “as an act of toleration, it certainly was the most complete which had hitherto been passed in this country.”  It was, in fact, the beginning of the abandonment of that system of discouragement of and hostility to all sects except the Established Church, which had hitherto been regarded by a large party as one of the most essential principles of the constitution.  And as such it makes the year 1812 in some respects a landmark in our constitutional history.