Trinity which should neither fall into Tritheism on the one side, nor into Sabellianism on the other, occupied the attention of ecclesiastics, and contributed with other causes to divert them from speculations about the foundations of government. The writings of Hoadly, however, soon gave a new bent to their energies. This very able man, who possessed all the moral and intellectual qualities of a consummate controversialist, had for some years been rapidly acquiring the position which Burnet had before held in the Low Church ranks. His latitudinarianism, however, was of a more extreme and emphatic character, and he greatly surpassed Burnet in the incisive brilliancy of his controversial writing, though he was far inferior to him in learning and versatility, in depth and beauty of character, and in the discharge of his episcopal duties. He was first brought forward by Sherlock, who afterwards became one of his leading opponents. He had acquired some notoriety during the Sacheverell trial by the power and clearness with which he denounced the doctrine of passive obedience, and he became noted as a trenchant writer against the Tory party. The new Government, in the first year of its accession, promoted him to the bishopric of Bangor; and soon afterwards, in reply to some papers of the Nonjuror Hickes, he published his Preservative against the Principles and Practices of the Nonjurors in Church and State,' in which he argued that all political power proceeded from the people, denied both the doctrine of Apostolical Succession and the necessity of being in connection with any particular Church, and asserted that sincerity is the one necessary requirement for the Christian profession. In March 1717 he preached before the King his famous sermon On the Kingdom of Christ,' in which he enunciated with great clearness and force doctrines subversive of the whole theory of the High Church party. Christ himself, he maintained, is

the sole judge and lawgiver of the Christian Church. No human power has a right to impose spiritual tests or spiritual punishments. The true Church of Christ is not a visible organisation, but the sum of all, whether dispersed or united, who trust in Him; and all attempts by temporal rewards or punishments to induce men to believe or discard particular religious opinions are essentially repugnant to the Christian religion. Probably no other sermon ever produced so voluminous a controversy, or excited in clerical circles so prolonged an agitation, but it is a significant fact that the movement appears to have been purely literary, and it was followed by no recurrence of the Sacheverell riots. The opinions of Hoadly were steadily growing among the educated classes, and Church fanaticism was somewhat subsiding throughout the country. The Government acted with a high hand and with undisguised partiality. Four royal chaplains who had written against Hoadly were deprived of their positions. The Lower House of Convocation, having drawn up a severe and elaborate remonstrance against the sermon of Hoadly, was prorogued, and though it still continued to be formally assembled with every Parliament, it obtained no royal licence enabling it to transact business for more than a century.

A great centre of opposition and a great seedplot of religious intolerance thus passed away. The sympathies of the lower clergy were in violent hostility to both the civil Government and the bishops, and their power over the country districts and over the universities rendered them most formidable. The course of events, however, had been flowing steadily against them. Public opinion was exasperated by the large proportion of Scotch Episcopalians who were concerned in the rebellion of 1715,1

'See the letters which Bishop Nicholson wrote from Carlisle to

and by the appearance of more than one English Nonjuror clergyman upon the scaffold. The divisions of the clergy and the secularising tendencies of the time had done their work, and the suspension of the synodical action of the Church hardly created a murmur of agitation. Few representative bodies have ever fallen more unhonoured and unlamented. Atterbury, the most brilliant tribune, orator, and pamphleteer of the High Church party, was deeply immersed in Jacobite conspiracies, and was thrown into prison in 1722. Great efforts were made to raise a storm of enthusiasm in his favour. Pathetic pictures were exposed to view representing him looking through the bars of his prison. The London clergy showed their sympathies by having prayers for him in most of the churches, on the pretext that he was suffering from the gout. He lay for several months in prison, and was then, by the violent measure of a bill of pains and penalties, deprived of his spiritual dignities and sent into exile. Twice before, within the memory of men who were still living, had English Governments attempted to strike down popular representatives of the Church, and on each occasion the blow had recoiled upon themselves. The prosecution of the seven bishops contributed more than any other single cause to shatter the dynasty of the Stuarts, and the impeachment of Sacheverell to ruin the great ministry of Godolphin. Under any circumstances a bill of pains and penalties, by which Parliament assumes the functions of a court of justice and condemns men against whom no sufficient legal evidence can be adduced, is an extreme, unconstitutio and justly unpopular measure. So rapidly, had the ecclesiastical sentiment throughout declined that the Whig ministry of George I.

of the Bishop of Edinburgh.British Museum, Add. MSS. 6116,

was able, without serious difficulty, by such a measure to deprive of his dignities and to banish from the country the most brilliant and popular bishop in the English Church.

This contrast is very marked, and it is all the more significant because the arrest and exile of Atterbury took place at a time when England seemed peculiarly ripe for agitation. The ruin, the poverty, the indignation which the failure of the South Sea Company had spread through every part of the kingdom, had the natural effect of everywhere reviving political discontent. The birth of the young Pretender in 1720 had rekindled the hopes of the Jacobites. It was noticed that when a gentleman named Stuart was chosen in 1721 Lord Mayor of London, the streets were filled on Lord Mayor's day by enthusiastic crowds shouting' High Church and Stuart!' Soon after, information received from the French Regent, and corroborated by intercepted letters, revealed the existence of a most formidable Jacobite plot. An expedition was to have invaded England under the Duke of Ormond. A plan was made for seizing the Bank and the Tower. The design appeared so serious to the Government that the most stringent measures were taken. A camp was formed in Hyde Park; all military officers were ordered to repair at once to their commands; troops were brought over from Ireland; the King postponed his intended visit to Hanover; the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended for a year. Among those who were arrested, in addition to Atterbury, on suspicion of high treason, were the Duke of Norfolk, the first peer of the realm, Lord North and Grey, Lord Orrery, and Dr. Friend, the famous physician, who was also a Member of the House of Commons. A gentleman named Layer, who was tried and found guilty of enlisting soldiers for the Pretender, was hanged and quartered; and bills of pains and penalties were carried,

though not without much opposition, through both Houses, condemning a Jesuit named Plunket and a Nonjuror clergyman named Kelly to perpetual imprisonment and the forfeiture of their goods. It was in this critical and anxious moment that the Government, by a similar method, struck down the prelate who was the special representative of the High Church party, and did so with a perfect impunity.2

We

These facts are sufficient to show the great change which, in less than a generation, had passed over ecclesiastical sentiment in England, and also, I hope, the means by which that change was effected. may next proceed to examine the manner in which the dominant Whig party availed themselves of their opportunity to legislate on the subject of religious liberty; and, in order to do so with the greatest clearness, I propose to abandon for the present the strictly chronological order of events, and, adjourning the consideration of all other incidents, to devote the next few pages to exhibiting in a single picture the whole religious legislation in England during the reigns of the first two princes of the House of Brunswick. The class whose claims were most keenly felt by the Whig party were, of course, the ordinary Protestant Nonconformists. They had been, as we have seen, excluded by the Corporation Act of 1661, and by the Test Act of 1673, from all corporations and from all public offices, while the Occasional Conformity Act increased the stringency of the earlier legislation by excluding those moderate Dissenters who,

Tindal. The insertion of the forfeiture of goods into the bill against Plunket was believed to be done merely in order to form a precedent, as Plunket had no property. See the protests of the Lords, in Rogers, i. 334-340.

2 Tindal, Smollett, Coxe's Walpole, Parl. Hist. vol. viii. The guilt of Atterbury which was doubted by some has been fully proved by the publication of the Stuart papers.