private houses.  As for Romanists, so far from their condition being in any way mitigated, their yoke was made the harder, and they might complain, with Rehoboam’s subjects, that they were no longer chastised with whips, but with scorpions.  William’s reign was marked by a long list of new penal laws directed against them.  There were many who quoted with great approval the advice (published in 1690, and republished in 1716) of ’a good patriot, guided by a prophetic spirit.’  His ‘short and easy method’ was, to ‘expel the whole sect from the British dominions,’ and, laying aside ‘the feminine weakness’ of an unchristian toleration, ’once for all, to clear the land of these monsters, and force them to transplant themselves.’  Much in the same way there were many good people who would have very much liked to adopt violent physical measures against ‘freethinkers’ and ‘atheists.’  Steele in the ‘Tatler,’ Budgell in the ‘Spectator,’ and Bishop Berkeley in the ‘Guardian,’ all express a curious mixture of satisfaction and regret that such opinions could not be summarily punished, if not by the severest penalties of the law, at the very least by the cudgel and the horsepond.  Whiston seems to have thought it possible that heterodox opinions upon the mystery of the Trinity might even yet, under certain contingencies, bring a man into peril of his life.  In a noticeable passage of his memoirs, written perhaps in a moment of depression, he speaks of learning the prayer of Polycarp, ‘if it should be my lot to die a martyr.’  The early part of the eighteenth century abounds in indications that amid a great deal of superficial talk about the excellence of toleration the older spirit of persecution was quite alive, ready, if circumstances favoured it, to burst forth again, not perhaps with firebrand and sword, but with the no less familiar weapons of confiscations and imprisonment.  Toleration was not only very imperfectly understood, even by those who most lauded it, but it was often loudly vaunted by men whose lives and opinions were very far from recommending it.  In an age notorious for laxity and profaneness, it was only too obvious that great professions of tolerance were in very many cases only the fair-sounding disguise of flippant scepticism or shallow indifference.  The number of such instances made some excuse for those who so misunderstood the Christian liberalism of such men as Locke and Lord Somers, as to charge it with irreligion or even atheism.

Nevertheless the growth of toleration was one of the most conspicuous marks of the eighteenth century.  If one were to judge only from the slowness of legislation in this respect, and the grudging reluctance with which it conceded to Nonconformists the first scanty instalments of complete civil freedom, or from the words and conduct of a considerable number of the clergy, or from certain fierce outbursts of mob riot against Roman Catholics, Methodists, and Jews, it might be argued that if toleration did indeed advance, it