148

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP.

XIV.

1689 .

Constitu-tion ofthe Con-vocation.

Manses had been sacked; churches shut up; prayer hooksburned; sacred garments tom; congregations dispersed byviolence; priests hustled, pelted, pilloried, driven forth, withtheir wives and babes, to beg or die of hunger. That theseoutrages were to be imputed, not to a few lawless marauders,but to the great body of the Presbyterians of Scotland, wasevident from the fact that the government had not dared eitherto inflict punishment on the offenders or to grant relief to thesufferers. Was it not fit then that the Church of Englandshould take warning? Was it reasonable to ask her to mutilateher apostolical polity and her beautiful ritual for the purpose ofconciliating those who wanted nothing but power to rabble heras they had rabbled her sister? Already these men had ob-tained a boon which they ill deserved, and which they neverwould have granted. They worshipped God in perfect security.Their meeting houses were as effectually protected as the choirsof our cathedrals. While no episcopal minister could, withoutputting his life in jeopardy, officiate in Ayrshire or Renfrew-shire, a hundred Presbyterian ministers preached unmolestedevery Sunday in Middlesex. The legislature had, with agenerosity perhaps imprudent, granted toleration to the mostintolerant of men; and with toleration it behoved them to becontent.

Thus several causes conspired to inflame the parochial. clergy against the scheme of comprehension. Their temper wassuch that, if the plan framed in the Jerusalem Chamber hadbeen directly submitted to them, it would have been rejected bya majority of twenty to one. But in the Convocation theirweight bore no proportion to their number. The Convocationhas, happily for our country, been so long utterly insignificantthat, till a recent period, none but curious students cared to in-quire how it was constituted; and even now many persons, notgenerally ill informed, imagine it to have been a council repre-