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which permitted scrupulous persons to communicate sittingvery narrowly escaped the same fate. In the Committee it was ■struck out, and, on the report, was with great difficulty re-stored. The majority of peers in the House w'as against theproposed indulgence, and the scale was but just turned by theproxies.

But by this time it began to appear that the bill which theHigh Churchmen were so keenly assailing was menaced bydangers from a very different quarter. The same considerationswhich had induced Nottingham to support a comprehensionmade comprehension an object of dread and aversion to a largebody of dissenters. The truth is that the time for such a schemehad gone by. If, a hundred years earlier, when the divisionin the Protestant body was recent, Elizabeth had been so wiseas to abstain from requiring the observance of a few forms whicha large part of her subjects considered as Popish, she mightperhaps have averted those fearful calamities which, forty yearsafter her death, afflicted the Church. But the general tendencyof schism is to widen. Had Leo the Tenth, when the exactionsand impostures of the Pardoners first roused the indignation ofSaxony, corrected those evil practices with a vigorous hand, itis not improbable that Luther would have died in the bosom ofthe Church of Borne. But the opportunity was suffered toescape; and, when, a few years later, the Vatican would gladlyhave purchased peace by yielding the original subject of quarrel,the original subject of quarrel W'as almost forgotten. The in-quiring spirit which had been roused by a single abuse had dis-covered or imagined a thousand: controversies engenderedcontroversies: every attempt that was made to accommodateone dispute ended by producing another; and at length a Ge-neral Council, which, during the earlier stages of the distemper,had been supposed to be an infallible remedy, made the caseutterly hopeless. In this respect, as in many others, the history

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