been the dissenting
preachers. [88]

The easy manner in which the zealous friends of the Church gave up her
confession of faith presents a striking contrast to the spirit with
which they struggled for her polity and her ritual. The clause which
admitted Presbyterian ministers to hold benefices without episcopal
ordination was rejected. The clause which permitted scrupulous persons
to communicate sitting very narrowly escaped the same fate. In the
Committee it was struck out, and, on the report, was with great
difficulty restored. The majority of peers in the House was against the
proposed indulgence, and the scale was but just turned by the proxies.

But by this time it began to appear that the bill which the High
Churchmen were so keenly assailing was menaced by dangers from a very
different quarter. The same considerations which had induced Nottingham
to support a comprehension made comprehension an object of dread and
aversion to a large body of dissenters. The truth is that the time
for such a scheme had gone by. If, a hundred years earlier, when the
division in the Protestant body was recent, Elizabeth had been so wise
as to abstain from requiring the observance of a few forms which a
large part of her subjects considered as Popish, she might perhaps have
averted those fearful calamities which, forty years after her death,
afflicted the Church. But the general tendency of schism is to widen.
Had Leo the Tenth, when the exactions and impostures of the Pardoners
first roused the indignation of Saxony, corrected those evil practices
with a vigorous hand, it is not improbable that Luther would have died
in the bosom of the Church of Rome. But the opportunity was suffered
to escape; and, when, a few years later, the Vatican would gladly
have purchased peace by yielding the original subject of quarrel, the
original subject of quarrel was almost forgotten. The inquiring spirit
which had been roused by a single abuse had discovered or imagined a
thousand: controversies engendered controversies: every attempt that
was made to accommodate one dispute ended by producing another; and
at length a General Council, which, during the earlier stages of the
distemper, had been supposed to be an infallible remedy, made the case
utterly hopeless. In this respect, as in many others, the history
of Puritanism in England bears a close analogy to the history of
Protestantism in Europe. The Parliament of 1689 could no more put an end
to