majority of peers in the House was against the proposed
indulgence, and the scale was but just turned by the proxies.

But by this time it began to appear that the bill which the High
Churchmen were so keenly assailing was menaced by dangers from a
very different quarter. The same considerations which had induced
Nottingham to support a comprehension made comprehension an
object of dread and aversion to a large body of dissenters. The
truth is that the time for such a scheme had gone by. If, a
hundred years earlier, when the division in the Protestant body
was recent, Elizabeth had been so wise as to abstain from
requiring the observance of a few forms which a large part of her
subjects considered as Popish, she might perhaps have averted
those fearful calamities which, forty years after her death,
afflicted the Church. But the general tendency of schism is to
widen. Had Leo the Tenth, when the exactions and impostures of
the Pardoners first roused the indignation of Saxony, corrected
those evil practices with a vigorous hand, it is not improbable
that Luther would have died in the bosom of the Church of Rome.
But the opportunity was suffered to escape; and, when, a few
years later, the Vatican would gladly have purchased peace by
yielding the original subject of quarrel, the original subject of
quarrel was almost forgotten. The inquiring spirit which had been
roused by a single abuse had discovered or imagined a thousand:
controversies engendered controversies: every attempt that was
made to accommodate one dispute ended by producing another; and
at length a General Council, which, during the earlier stages of
the distemper, had been supposed to be an infallible remedy, made
the case utterly hopeless. In this respect, as in many others,
the history of Puritanism in England bears a close analogy to the