Canterbury
had been issued; and the clergy were every where in a state of violent
excitement. They had just taken the oaths, and were smarting from the
earnest reproofs of nonjurors, from the insolent taunts of Whigs, and
often undoubtedly from the stings of remorse. The announcement that
a Convocation was to sit for the purpose of deliberating on a plan of
comprehension roused all the strongest passions of the priest who had
just complied with the law, and was ill satisfied or half satisfied with
himself for complying. He had an opportunity of contributing to defeat
a favourite scheme of that government which had exacted from him,
under severe penalties, a submission not easily to be reconciled to his
conscience or his pride. He had an opportunity of signalising his zeal
for that Church whose characteristic doctrines he had been accused of
deserting for lucre. She was now, he conceived, threatened by a danger
as great as that of the preceding year. The Latitudinarians of 1689 were
not less eager to humble and to ruin her than the Jesuits of 1688.
The Toleration Act had done for the Dissenters quite as much as was
compatible with her dignity and security; and nothing more ought to be
conceded, not the hem of one of her vestments, not an epithet from the
beginning to the end of her Liturgy. All the reproaches which had been
thrown on the ecclesiastical commission of James were transferred to
the ecclesiastical commission of William. The two commissions indeed
had nothing but the name in common. Put the name was associated with
illegality and oppression, with the violation of dwellings and the
confiscation of freeholds, and was therefore assiduously sounded with no
small effect by the tongues of the spiteful in the ears of the ignorant.

The King too, it was said, was not sound. He conformed indeed to the
established worship; but his was a local and occasional conformity. For
some ceremonies to which High Churchmen were attached he had a distaste
which he was at no pains to conceal. One of his first acts had been
to give orders that in his private chapel the service should be said
instead of being sung; and this arrangement, though warranted by the
rubric, caused much murmuring, [495] It was known that he was so
profane as to sneer at a practice which had been sanctioned by high
ecclesiastical authority, the practice of touching for the scrofula.
This ceremony had come down almost unaltered from the darkest of the
dark a