Church comprehension never afterwards became, in any direct form, a question for much practical discussion.  The interest which the late efforts had excited lingered for some time in the minds, both of those who had promoted the measure and of those who had resisted it.  There was much warm debate upon the subject in the Convocation of 1702.  Sacheverell and the bigots of his party in 1709 lashed themselves into fury at the very thought that comprehension could be advocated.  It was treachery, rank and inexcusable; it was bringing the Trojan horse into the Holy City; it was converting the House of God into a den of thieves.[368] Such forms of speech were too common just about that period to mean much, or to attract any particular notice.  As Swift said, if the zealots of either party were to be believed, their adversaries were always wretches worthy to be exterminated.[369] Party spirit, at this period, ran so high, both in political and ecclesiastical matters, and minds were so excited and suspicious, that most men ranged themselves very definitely on one or another side of a clearly-marked line, and genuinely temperate counsels were much out of favour.  To the one party ‘moderation,’ that ’harmless, gilded name,’[370] had become wholly odious, as ever ’importing somewhat that was unkind to the Church, and that favoured the Dissenters.’[371] There was a story that ’a clergyman preaching upon the text, “Let your moderation be known unto all men,” took notice that the Latin word “moderor” signified rule and government, and by virtue of the criticism he made his text to signify, let the severity of your government be known unto all men.’[372] Yet it was not to be wondered at that they had got to hate the word.  The opposite party, adopting moderation jointly with union as their password, and glorifying it as ‘the cement of the world,’ ’the ornament of human kind,’ ‘the chiefest Christian grace,’ ’the peculiar characteristic of this Church,’[373] would pass on almost in the same breath to pile upon their opponents indiscriminate charges of persecution, priestcraft, superstition, and to inveigh against them as ‘a narrow Laudean faction,’ ’a jealous-headed, unneighbourly, selfish sect of Ishmaelites.’[374] Evidently, so long as the spirit of party was thus rampant, any measure of Church comprehension was entirely out of question.  Many Low Churchmen were as anxious for it as ever.  But they were no longer in power; and had they been a majority, they could only have effected it by sheer weight of numbers, and under imminent peril of disrupture in the Church.  Therefore, they did not even attempt it, and were content to labour toward the same ends by more indirect means.

In the middle of the century—­at a time when, except among the Methodists, religious zeal seemed almost extinct, and when (to use Walpole’s words) ’religious animosities were out of date, and the public had no turn for controversy’—­thoughts of comprehension revived both in the English Church and among the Nonconformists.