fixed upon them, are not capable of
persevering long in the daily practice of obscure virtues. It is by no
means improbable that zealots may have given their lives for a religion
which had never effectually restrained their vindictive or their
licentious passions. We learn indeed from fathers of the highest
authority that, even in the purest ages of the Church, some confessors,
who had manfully refused to save themselves from torments and death
by throwing frankincense on the altar of Jupiter, afterwards brought
scandal on the Christian name by gross fraud and debauchery, [479] For
the nonjuring divines great allowance must in fairness be made. They
were doubtless in a most trying situation. In general, a schism, which
divides a religious community, divides the laity as well as the clergy.
The seceding pastors therefore carry with them a large part of their
flocks, and are consequently assured of a maintenance. But the schism of
1689 scarcely extended beyond the clergy. The law required the rector to
take the oaths, or to quit his living: but no oath, no acknowledgment of
the title of the new King and Queen, was required from the parishioner
as a qualification for attending divine service, or for receiving the
Eucharist. Not one in fifty, therefore, of those laymen who disapproved
of the Revolution thought himself bound to quit his pew in the old
church, where the old liturgy was still read, and where the old
vestments were still worn, and to follow the ejected priest to a
conventicle, a conventicle, too, which was not protected by the
Toleration Act. Thus the new sect was a sect of preachers without
hearers; and such preachers could not make a livelihood by preaching. In
London, indeed, and in some other large towns, those vehement Jacobites,
whom nothing would satisfy but to hear King James and the Prince of
Wales prayed for by name, were sufficiently numerous to make up a few
small congregations, which met secretly, and under constant fear of
the constables, in rooms so mean that the meeting houses of the Puritan
dissenters might by comparison be called palaces. Even Collier, who had
all the qualities which attract large audiences, was reduced to be the
minister of a little knot of malecontents, whose oratory was on a second
floor in the city. But the nonjuring clergymen who were able to obtain
even a pittance by officiating at such places were very few. Of the
rest some had independent means: some lived by literature