In 1753 a Marriage Act, usually known as Lord Hardwicke's Act, was brought in, to decrease the number of the formal acts which constituted a pre-engagement, in which a man might be entangled by carelessness and against his own will, and, secondly, to check very rapid marriages. At this time the facilities given to marriage enabled heirs and heiresses to marry without consent of their natural guardians--a practice still further supported by a quantity of broken and disreputable parsons who hung about the Fleet Prison, and were known as Fleet Parsons, whose performance of the ceremony was binding, and who could of course always be procured for money. By the new Act marriages must be performed in the parish church, after publication of banns, or by special licenses granted by the Archbishop, and on payment of a heavy sum. Any clergyman solemnizing a marriage in contravention of these restrictions is liable to seven years' transportation. A Bill for the naturalization of Jews, although carried, had to be repealed before the popular uproar. The Bishops, who had supported the measure, drew upon themselves the larger share of the popular indignation. They were indeed at this time unusually liberal in their views. In the earlier part of the reign Queen Caroline, in whose hands the appointments had chiefly been, had carefully selected men of good repute and of liberal tendencies; in opposition to the general feeling of the clergy, she confined her appointments almost exclusively to Whigs. It is possible that this conduct, however praiseworthy in itself, may have tended to increase the general laxity among Churchmen and Dissenters, which had already begun to be visible before the death of Bishop Burnet. Since that time a variety of causes had combined to increase it. Thus, the separation of the Church from the State in their political views, the Church being chiefly Jacobite while the State was Whig; a similar division between the Bishops and their clergy, and between the Universities, and the Government, and the Bishops, all tended, by loosening the bonds of authority, to the decay of the Church. The falling away of the Dissenters, and the entire defeat of the Roman Catholics, had also removed all competition; and while thus unnerved, the Church had been called upon to answer the requirements of an increasing population and of growing towns. It had, moreover, to combat the very general growth of that scepticism which was so rife in France, and which was one of the remarkable symptoms of the coming revolution. [Sidenote: Rise of the Wesleyans. 1730.]