e; priests hustled, pelted, pilloried, driven forth,
with their wives and babes, to beg or die of hunger. That these outrages
were to be imputed, not to a few lawless marauders, but to the great
body of the Presbyterians of Scotland, was evident from the fact
that the government had not dared either to inflict punishment on the
offenders or to grant relief to the sufferers. Was it not fit then that
the Church of England should take warning? Was it reasonable to ask
her to mutilate her apostolical polity and her beautiful ritual for the
purpose of conciliating those who wanted nothing but power to rabble her
as they had rabbled her sister? Already these men had obtained a boon
which they ill deserved, and which they never would have granted.
They worshipped God in perfect security. Their meeting houses were
as effectually protected as the choirs of our cathedrals. While
no episcopal minister could, without putting his life in jeopardy,
officiate in Ayrshire or Renfrewshire, a hundred Presbyterian ministers
preached unmolested every Sunday in Middlesex. The legislature had,
with a generosity perhaps imprudent, granted toleration to the most
intolerant of men; and with toleration it behoved them to be content.

Thus several causes conspired to inflame the parochial clergy against
the scheme of comprehension. Their temper was such that, if the plan
framed in the Jerusalem Chamber had been directly submitted to them,
it would have been rejected by a majority of twenty to one. But in
the Convocation their weight bore no proportion to their number.
The Convocation has, happily for our country, been so long utterly
insignificant that, till a recent period, none but curious students
cared to inquire how it was constituted; and even now many persons, not
generally ill informed, imagine it to have been a council representing
the Church of England. In truth the Convocation so often mentioned
in our ecclesiastical history is merely the synod of the Province of
Canterbury, and never had a right to speak in the name of the whole
clerical body. The Province of York had also its convocation: but,
till the eighteenth century was far advanced, the Province of York was
generally so poor, so rude, and so thinly peopled, that, in political
importance, it could hardly be considered as more than a tenth part of
the kingdom. The sense of the Southern clergy was therefore popularly
considered as the sense of the whole profession. When the formal