by them as the "grand design of the Devil;" "the most ready compendium and sure way to destroy all religion, all the devils in hell and their instruments being at work to promote it." Cromwell, himself an Independent, guaranteed freedom in religion to all except Papists and Prelatists. The Triers and Commissioners for rejecting ignorant and scandalous ministers treated every Episcopally ordained clergyman with marked injustice; it is computed that they ejected from their Livings not fewer than seven thousand clergymen, besides curates, masters of hospitals and schoolmasters; and as the great majority of these were married men, it is probable that full thirty thousand people were turned out into the world to get their living as they could, or to starve. Those eleven years of Puritan ascendancy must still have lived in the minds of many people surviving at the time of the Revolution; many must have remembered the days when ordination at the hands of the sequestered Bishops, the attendance at the services of the Church, and even the use of the Prayer-Book, were exposed to the greatest perils. Is it possible that men who hated Episcopacy, who hated the

¶ Gangræna, i. 58.

Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy.

Evelyn tells us that after Christmas, 1655, "the Church was reduced to a chamber or a Conventicle;" that when "we went up to receive the Sacrament, the miscreants held their muskets at us, as if they would shoot us at the Altar."

Prayer-Book, which they designated as "the Mass in English," "Porridge," and by other such like terms of opprobrium, would have been contented with the concessions that even the most Latitudinarian Churchmen could have afforded them t? Here again history answers the question. What happened under the Commonwealth did actually happen again in Scotland a few years after toleration was conceded under William to the Dissenters in England. As Toleration had been granted to the Presbyterians in England it does not appear an extravagant demand that the Presbyterians would grant a like Toleration to the Episcopalians in Scotland. But when in 1703 a Bill to that effect was offered to the Scottish Parliament, the General Assembly was scandalized, and published a protestation; "they were persuaded that to enact a Toleration for those of the Episcopal way (which God in His mercy avert!) would be to establish iniquity by law;" and so an Act was passed by which it was declared High Treason to "endeavour any alteration in it;" i.e. in the government of the Church.

It is unpleasant to rake up the memorial of past misdeeds, but it is of the first importance at the present time that such points of history should be borne

The question of the ejection of the intruders on St. Bartholomew's day, whether or how it could have been avoided, does not come within the scope of this work.

in mind, and it is useful to reflect that what happened once may, in a mitigated degree, happen again. When we duly consider those historical facts which have been related, and how intolerant and prone to persecution the Nonconformists when in power were in times gone by; when we remember that there were no stronger advocates for a statereligion, or more willing recipients of tithes and Church rates than the Puritans of the Commonwealth, we think that many of the objections brought by the Liberationists at the present day against the Church must vanish into thin air, and that the people of England will think twice before, to please the whims of Liberationists, they consent to disestablish, disendow, or in any way to weaken a Church which for centuries has been the cause of so much peace and so many blessings to the community at large.

A

CHAPTER II.

THE BIRTH OF TOLERATION.

SCHEME for the Toleration and Comprehension

of Dissenters in the Church, found an advocate in the Earl of Nottingham, at that time Secretary of State. Of all the ministers of William, Nottingham, from the purity of his moral character and his devoted attachment to the Church, was the most acceptable to Churchmen. He understood the desirability of conciliating Dissenters, and was thoroughly in favour of toleration; he was also not unwilling to make some modifications in the discipline and ritual of the Church, with the view of admitting into the Church the more moderate Dissenters, and favoured some compromise in the Test Act. With this view he brought forward a Bill in the House of Lords for "uniting their Majesties' Protestant subjects," and a few days afterwards he brought forward another Bill for "exempting their Majesties' Protestant subjects, dissenting from the Church of England, from the penalties of certain laws;" the former is better known as a Bill for Comprehension, the latter as the Bill for Toleration a.

Burnet, whom William had already made Bishop of Salisbury, says, O. T. iii. 11, “I happened to come into the House

The Comprehension Bill was supported in the House of Lords by Compton, Bishop of Londonwho, on the retirement of Sancroft from public business, was virtually Primate-and Burnet, and although the clauses relating to the Test Act were rejected, the Bill passed the House of Lords on April 8, 1689. On the 18th of the same month the Bill for Toleration also passed the House of Lords, and both Bills went down together to the House of Commons, there to meet with a very different fate. The Toleration Bill had an easy passage through the Commons, and soon became law. Far otherwise was it with the Comprehension Bill. The members of that House, Whigs as well as Tories, were opposed to the King's scheme for comprehending Dissenters; it was too much to expect from Englishmen that they would alter the constitution of their Church to suit the views of a King who was a Presbyterian; it was evident to them that he only thought about obliging the Dissenters without

of Lords when two great debates were managed with much heat in it. The one was about the Toleration, and the other was about imposing oaths on the clergy. And I was engaged in my first coming there to bear a large share in both."

"I professed myself zealous for it," wrote Burnet.

"The Church party was far more numerous in Parliament." - Dalrymple's Memoirs, ii. Lord Macaulay says, without, however, adducing any authority, "Nothing is more certain than that two-thirds of the members were either Low Churchmen, or no Churchmen at all."