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