_Religious toleration._--The revolution is justly entitled to honour as the era of religious, in a far greater degree than of civil liberty; the privileges of conscience having had no earlier magna charta and petition of right whereto they could appeal against encroachment. Civil, indeed, and religious liberty had appeared, not as twin sisters and co-heirs, but rather in jealous and selfish rivalry; it was in despite of the law, it was through infringement of the constitution, by the court's connivance, by the dispensing prerogative, by the declarations of indulgence under Charles and James, that some respite had been obtained from the tyranny which those who proclaimed their attachment to civil rights had always exercised against one class of separatists, and frequently against another. At the time when the test law was enacted, chiefly with a view against popery, but seriously affecting the protestant nonconformists, it was the intention of the House of Commons to afford relief to the latter by relaxing in some measure the strictness of the act of uniformity in favour of such ministers as might be induced to conform, by granting an indulgence of worship to those who should persist in their separation. This bill however dropped in that session. Several more attempts at an union were devised by worthy men of both parties in that reign, but with no success. It was the policy of the court to withstand a comprehension of dissenters; nor would the bishops admit of any concession worth the others' acceptance. The high-church party would not endure any mention of indulgence.[257] In the parliament of 1680, a bill to relieve protestant dissenters from the penalties of the 35th of Elizabeth, the most severe act in force against them, having passed both houses, was lost off the table of the House of Lords, at the moment that the king came to give his assent; an artifice by which he evaded the odium of an explicit refusal.[258] Meanwhile the nonconforming ministers, and in many cases their followers, experienced a harassing persecution under the various penal laws that oppressed them; the judges, especially in the latter part of this reign, when some good magistrates were gone, and still more the justices of the peace, among whom a high-church ardour was prevalent, crowding the gaols with the pious confessors of puritanism.[259] Under so rigorous an administration of statute law, it was not unnatural to take the shelter offered by the declaration of indulgence; but the dissenters never departed from their ancient abhorrence of popery and arbitrary power, and embraced the terms of reconciliation and alliance which the church, in its distress, held out to them. A scheme of comprehension was framed under the auspices of Archbishop Sancroft before the revolution. Upon the completion of the new settlement it was determined, with the apparent concurrence of the church, to grant an indulgence to separate conventicles, and at the same time, by