"Three strangers blaze amidst the bonfire's revel: The Pope, and the Pretender, and the Devil. Three strangers hate our faith and faith's defender: The Devil, and the Pope, and the Pretender. The strangers will be strangers long, we hope: The Devil, and the Pretender, and the Pope. Thus in three rhymes three strangers dance the hay, And he that chooses to dance after them may." We now come to a class of items chiefly connected with ecclesiastical control over matters both secular and religious--instances of the exercise of power by the Church for the punishment of offenders against her discipline. Every reader of history is acquainted with the force and effect of excommunication in the middle ages. By a sentence of excommunication, both greater and less, the victims were excluded from the right of Christian burial, from bringing or maintaining actions, from becoming attorneys or jurymen, and were rendered incapable of becoming witnesses in any cause. Long before the Reformation the frequency and abuse of this ecclesiastical weapon proved both a scandal and a disadvantage to the Church, by bringing the practice in some degree into contempt; and in the thirteenth century many applications were made to the king complaining of the resistance of excommunicated offenders who defied the utmost that the Church could do to reduce them to submission. In 1289, John, vicar of Feckenham, was excommunicated by Godfrey, Bishop of Worcester, who appealed in the same manner for secular aid. When the nation reformed its religion, the power of excommunication was still retained by the Church, and is in force even to the present day, although modified by the 53rd of George III, chap. 127, which restricts the maximum term of imprisonment in all such cases to six months. (See more on this subject under the head of St. Nicholas' parish.) Obstinately refusing to attend divine service in the parish church, incontinency, contumacy in not appearing when cited in the Consistory Court, brawling, and scolding--these were the principal offences for the punishment of which the Church most frequently put forth her power, as also on Quakers and Popish recusants.