The attitude of mind herein implied is in large part the reaction from the Erastian temper of the government.  Under William, that temper is intelligible enough; for unless he held the Church in strict control, he must have felt that he was giving a large handle to his enemies.  Under Anne, the essence of the situation remained unchanged, even though her eager sympathy with the Church was beyond all question.  William had relieved Nonconformists from the burden of penal statute; the Occasional Conformity Act of 1713 broadly continued the exclusion of all save the more yielding of them from political office.  When the Hanoverians succeeded they were willing to repeal its more rigid intolerance; but the Test Act remained as evidence that the Dissenters were not yet regarded as in a full sense part of the national life.

The reasons for the hatred of dissent go back in part to the Civil War and in part also to the feeling of common ground between the dissenting interest and Rome which was born of the struggle under Elizabeth and James.  The pamphlets are innumerable; and most of them deserve the complete obliquity into which they have fallen.  We are told, in the eighteenth as in the seventeenth century, that the Presbyterian theory of government is inconsistent with the existence of the civil power.  “They claim,” said Leslie, “power to abrogate the laws of the land touching ecclesiastical matters, if they judge them hurtful or unprofitable...  They require the civil magistrate to be subject to their power.”  Of Knox or Cartwright this is no unfair account; but of the later Presbyterians it is the merest travesty.  It supposes that they would be willing to push to the utmost limit the implications of the theory of the two kingdoms—­a supposition which their passive submission to the Act of 1712 restoring lay patronage decisively refutes.  Bramhall had no doubt that their discipline was “the very quintessence of refined popery,” and the argument is repeated by a hundred less learned pamphleteers.  Neither the grim irony of Defoe nor the proven facts of the case could wean either the majority of Churchmen or the masses of the people from the belief that the Revolution endangered the very existence of the Church and that concession would be fatal.  So stoutly did the Church resist it that the accession of George I alone, in Lecky’s view, prevented the repeal of the Toleration Act and the destruction of the political benefits of the Revolution.

But nowhere was the temper of the time more clearly displayed than in the disputes over Convocation.  To William’s advisers, perhaps, more than to the Church itself their precipitation is due; for had they not, at the outset of the reign, suggested large changes in the liturgy suspicions then aroused might well have slumbered.  As it was, the question of the royal supremacy immediately came into view and the clergy spared no effort to meet the issue so raised.  And this they felt the more bitterly because the upper