abounded in Grace?" His Latin and Greek stood him in little stead.
He was to give an account only of the state of his Soul--whether he
was of the Number of the Elect; what was the Occasion of his
Conversion; upon what Day of the Month and Hour of the Day it
happened; how it was carried on, and when completed. The whole
Examination was summed up in one short Question, namely, WHETHER HE
WAS PREPARED FOR DEATH? The Boy, who had been bred up by honest
Parents, was frighted out of his wits by the solemnity of the
Proceeding, and by the last dreadful Interrogatory, so that, upon
making his Escape out of this House of Mourning, he could never be
brought a second Time to the Examination, as not being able to go
through the Terrors of it."


By the year 1705, when Tom Hearne, of St. Edmund's Hall, began to
keep his diary, the "honest folk"--that is, the High Churchmen--had
the better of the Independent Ministers. The Dissenters had some
favour at Court, but in the University they were looked upon as
utterly reprobate. From the Reliquiae of Hearne (an antiquarian
successor of Antony Wood, a bibliophile, an archaeologist, and as
honest a man as Jacobitism could make him) let us quote an example of
Heaven's wrath against Dissenters


"Aug. 6, 1706. We have an account from Whitchurch, in Shropshire,
that the Dissenters there having prepared a great quantity of bricks
to erect a spacious conventicle, a destroying angel came by night and
spoiled them all, and confounded their Babel in the beginning, to
their great mortification.