Page after page he corrected with the utmost care, from the very title-page and calendar to the end. July has the characteristic note, 'Out with Dog-days from amongst the Saints.'--A considerable number of his suggestions are part of the Prayer Book to this day. The final clause of the prayer for the Church Militant beginning 'We also bless, etc.,' though not Bishop Wren's composition, as he intended to have replaced the Commemoration of the Saints and the Thanksgiving as it stood in the first Prayer Book of Edward VI., is yet due to his suggestion. The whole series of notes and emendations is very interesting, though they are more than can be given here. Two things plainly appear: that he wished to return as nearly as possible to the first Prayer Book of Edward VI., as the one most closely resembling the offices of the Early Church; that he was very desirous to have the book made as full, as plain, and as clear as the English language could make it. He was anxious that no needless stumbling-blocks should remain in the path either of Churchmen or of Nonconformists, but at the same time he had no intention of bartering any portion of Church truth or discipline for the doubtful advantages of 'comprehension.' It is a proof that he was not, with all his high-minded firmness, the persecuting prelate of Puritan pamphleteers, or the sour and severe man which, in early days, Lord Clarendon thought him, that both in Norwich, his former diocese, and in the one he then ruled, most of the clergy renounced the Covenant.[83] S. Bartholomew's day, 1662, was the time fixed for those who refused to conform to the Church to resign their livings. It has been easy to represent this as a piece of cruel tyranny, as the turning out of a body of pious men who were labouring in the work which others neglected. In truth, as even Milton says, they were 'time-servers, covetous, illiterate persecutors, not lovers of the truth, like in most things whereof they had accused their predecessors.' To this grave indictment must be added that they were, in the strictest sense, intruders, thrust into charges by Cromwell's authority, while the true priests were imprisoned, fined, forbidden to minister, or even to teach as schoolmasters, and literally left to starve. 'The majority of these were dead and none had been ordained to fill up the gaps, during all the long years since the Church's overthrow.... Of the eight thousand intruding Nonconformists, a bare two thousand--1700 would probably be nearer the number--refused conformity. 'In other words, the Church of the Restoration had to begin her work with a clergy of whom at least three-fourths were aliens at heart to her doctrine and her discipline. To the politician this result was most satisfactory; to the Church little short of disastrous.'[84] [_GARTER RECORDS RESTORED._]