Whilst Queen Elizabeth and her advisers did succeed in making some sort of a settlement of religion having regard to the questions of her time, the Restoration bishops, an inferior set of men, wholly failed. The repressive legislation that followed upon the Act of Uniformity, succeeded in establishing and endowing (with voluntary contributions) what is sometimes called, absurdly enough, Political Dissent. On points, not of doctrine, but of ceremony, and of church government, one half of the religiously-minded community were by oaths and declarations, and by employing the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper as "a picklock to a place," drawn out of the service of the State. Excluded from Parliament and from all corporate bodies, from grammar-schools and universities, English Dissent learned to live its own life, remote from the army, the navy, and the civil service, quite outside of what perhaps may be fairly called the main currents of the national life. Nonconformists venerated their own divines, were reared in their own academies and colleges, read their own books, went, when the modified law permitted it, to their own conventicles in back streets, and made it their boast that they had never entered their parish churches, for the upkeep of which they were compelled to subscribe--save for the purpose of being married. The nation suffered by reason of this complete severance. Trade excepted, there was no community of interest between Church and Dissent. Sobriety, gravity, a decent way of life, the sense of religious obligation (even when united with the habit of _extempore_ prayer, and a hereditary disrespect for bishops' aprons), are national assets, as the expression now goes, which cannot be disregarded with impunity. The Conventicle Act Marvell refers to was a stringent measure, imposing pecuniary fines upon any persons of sixteen years of age or upwards who "under pretence of religion" should be present at any meeting of more than five persons, or more than those of the household, "in other manner than allowed by the Liturgy and practice of the Church of England." Heavier fines were imposed upon the preachers. The poet Waller, who was "nursed in Parliaments," having been first returned from Amersham in 1621, made a very sensible remark on the second reading: "Let them alone and they will preach against each other; by this Bill they will incorporate as being all under one calamity."[145:1] But by 144 to 78 the Bill was read, though it did not become law until the following session. An indignant Member of Parliament once told Cromwell that he would take the "sense" of the House against some proposal. "Very well," said Cromwell, "you shall take the 'sense' of the House, and I will take the 'nonsense,' and we will see who tells the most votes."