issenters here were wholly right in communicating with
the National Church, even, though they wrongly considered it less
perfect than their own.[402] He has elsewhere remarked upon the unseemly
inconsistency of Prince George of Denmark, who voted in the House of
Lords against occasional Conformity, but was himself in every sense of
the word an occasional Conformist, keeping up a Lutheran service, but
sometimes receiving the Sacrament according to the English rites.[403]

There were of course many men of extreme views on either side to whom,
if there had been no such thing as a Test Act, the practice of
occasional conformity was a sign of laxity, wholly to be condemned. It
was indifference, they said, lukewarmness, neutrality; it was involving
the orthodox in the guilt of heresy; it was a self-proclaimed
confession of the sin of needless schism. Sacheverell, in his famous
sermon, raved against it as an admission of a Trojan horse, big with
arms and ruin, into the holy city. It was the persistent effort of false
brethren to carry the conventicle into the Church,[404] or the Church
into the conventicle. 'What could not be gained by comprehension and
toleration must be brought about by moderation and occasional
conformity; that is, what they could not do by open violence, they will
not fail by secret treachery to accomplish.'[405] Much in the same way,
there were Dissenters who would as soon hear the mass as the Liturgy,
who would as willingly bow themselves in the house of Rimmon as conform
for an hour to the usages of the English Church; and who, 'if you ask
them their exceptions at the Book, thank God they never looked at
it.'[406] By a decree of the Baptist conference in 1689,[407] repeated
in 1742,[408] persons who on any pretext received the Sacrament in a
parish church were to be at once excommunicated.

But, had it not been for the provisions of the Test Act, extreme views
on the subject would have received little attention, and the counsels of
men like Baxter, Bates, and Calamy would have gained a far deeper, if
not a wider, hold on the minds of all moderate Nonconformists. The
practice in question did, in fact, point towards a comprehension of
which the Liberal Churchmen of the time had as yet no idea, but one
which might have been based on far sounder principles than any of the
schemes which had hitherto been conceived. Under kindlier auspices it
might have matured into a system of auxiliary societies affiliated