On Sundays, the general excitement nowhere abated. At church, political rather than religious spirit rendered congregations attentive. They listened with all their ears to a clergyman, when he referred to the king’s supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, and when he had to enumerate the royal titles in the prayer before the sermon. If he omitted to note the supremacy, and the congregation were Whiggish, there was a loyal murmur of disapproval. If he happened to speak of his Majesty, not as ‘King by the Grace of God,’ but as ‘King by Divine Permission,’ the more sensitive loyalists would make a stir, withdraw from the church; and certain of the papers would be full of a holy horror at such proceedings on the part of the minister. [Sidenote: _SACHEVEREL._] In the sermon preached at St. Andrew’s, on the 20th of January――the Thanksgiving day for the accession of George I.――Sacheverel (while the king was being almost deified at St. Paul’s) reflected severely on the Government, and obliquely on the king himself and his family. Court, city, and army were alike charged with degrading vices. With still greater boldness did he attack the ministry for appointing as a Thanksgiving time the anniversary of the day on which Charles I. was brought to trial. Finally, Sacheverel denounced the Crown’s interference with the clergy. They who advised that course, he said, might any day counsel the king to commit acts hostile to both Law and Gospel. During the delivery of this political harangue, the Doctor’s friends were disturbed by an individual who took notes of the sermon. They said ‘it was more criminal to steal the Doctor’s words out of his mouth in the church than to pick a man’s pocket in the market, or to rob him on the highway.’ This sermon, which fired London, seems now to be but a poor thing. The text was from Matthew xxiii. 24-26. The discourse affirmed that national sins brought national punishment, especially ‘_the sin of that day_,’ which, it was inferred, had for its penalty――the present sad condition of England. The Jacobite spirit manifested itself most sharply in a passage referring to the regicides ‘who were concerned in the bloody actions of that bloody tragedy of that glorious martyr, King Charles the First, who was next of all to the Son of God himself.’ After murdering the king, the greatest sin, said Sacheverel, was to usurp the place of the heir. Every hearer felt that George I. was here hinted at as the usurper of the seat which by right belonged to James III. The putting to death of Charles, Sacheverel declared to be ‘the greatest sin that ever was.’ The ‘rebellion of the creature against the Sovereign’ was censured almost as heavily. The censure appeared to point against those who dethroned James II., but every hearer felt that it was directed against those who kept the throne――against James II.’s son and heir. [Sidenote: _POLITICS IN THE PULPIT._]