temper of the House was prejudiced, intemperate, and inquisitorial.  The Whig bishops, on the other hand, in the Upper House were impatient of opposition, and often inconsiderate and ungracious to the lower clergy.  Such, for example, were just the conditions which brought out the worse and disguised the more excellent traits of Burnet’s character.  It is not much to be wondered at, that many people who were very well affected to the Church thought it no great evil, but perhaps rather a good thing, that Convocation should be permanently suspended.  Reason and common sense demand that a great Church should have some sort of deliberative assembly.  If it were no longer what it ought to be, and the reason for this were not merely temporary, a remedy should have been found in reform, not in compelled silence.  But even in the midst of the factions which disturbed its peace and hindered its usefulness, Convocation had by no means wholly neglected to deliberate on practical matters of direct religious concern.  And unless its condition had been indeed degenerate, there can be little doubt that it would have materially assisted to keep up that healthy current of thought which the stagnation of Church spirit in the Georgian age so sorely needed.  The history, therefore, of Convocation in Queen Anne’s reign, turbulent as it was, had considerable interest of its own.  So also the Sacheverell riots (for they deserve no more honourable name) have much historical value as an index of feeling.  Ignorance and party faction, and a variety of such other unworthy components, entered largely into them.  Yet after every abatement has been made, they showed a strength of popular attachment to the Church which is very noteworthy.  The undisputed hold it had gained upon the masses ought to have been a great power for good, and it has been shown that there was about this time a good deal of genuine activity stirring in the English Church.  Unhappily, those signs of activity in it decreased, instead of being enlarged and deepened.  In whatever other respects during the years that followed it fulfilled some portion of its mission, it certainly lost, through its own want of energy, a great part of the influence it had enjoyed at this earlier date.

The first twenty years of the period include also a principal part of the history of the Nonjurors.  Later in the century, they had entirely drifted away from any direct association with the Established Church.  Their numbers had dwindled; and as there seemed to be no longer any tangible reason for their continued schism, sympathy with them had also faded away.  There are some interesting incidents in their later history, but these are more nearly related to the annals of the Episcopal Church of Scotland than to our own.  Step by step in the earlier years of the century the ties which linked them with the English Church were broken.  First came the death of the venerable bishops, Ken and Frampton; then the return to the established communion of Nelson, and Dodwell, and other moderate Nonjurors; then the wilful perpetuation of the schism by the consecration of bishops; then the division into two parties of those who adopted the Communion Book of Edward VI., with its distinctive usages, and those who were opposed to any change.  All this took place before 1718.  By that time the schism was complete.