On the 24th of May 1689, the _Act of Toleration_ became law. This act, long considered as the Great Charter of religious liberty, has since been extensively modified, and is hardly known to the present generation except by name. The several statutes passed between the accession of Queen Elizabeth and the Revolution, requiring all people, under severe penalties, to attend the services of the Church of England, and to abstain from attending conventicles, were left unrepealed; but provision was made that they should not be construed to extend to any person, who should testify his loyalty by taking the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, and his protestantism, by subscribing the declaration against transubstantiation. The severe Act of Uniformity, the Five Mile Act, and the Conventicle Act were not repealed, but merely relaxed; it being provided that dissenting ministers might preach, if they professed, under their hand, their belief in the Articles of the Church of England, with a few exceptions, such as, that the Church has power to regulate ceremonies, that the doctrines in the Book of Homilies are sound, and that there is nothing superstitious and idolatrous in the ordination service. But unless the minister subscribed thirty-four out of the thirty-nine Articles, and the greater part of two other Articles, he could not preach without incurring all the punishments which the cavaliers, in the day of their power and vengeance, had devised for the tormenting and ruining of schismatical teachers. Such were the terms on which the Protestant Dissenters of England were, for the first time, permitted by law to worship God according to their own consciences. They were, on the above conditions, allowed to attend their own places of worship, provided they were duly registered, and had not the doors locked or barred. They were protected against hostile intrusion, and it was made a penal offence to enter a meeting-house for the purpose of molesting a congregation. The only classes of religionists excepted from the benefits of this act were the Papists and Socinians.[82] ----- Footnote 82: Knight’s _History of England_, and Macaulay’s _History_. ----- Many of the Dissenters were still dissatisfied, and wished other matters of grievance to be settled in parliament. Accordingly, what was called the “Comprehension Bill” was brought into the House of Lords. The chief object of this bill was to admit Presbyterian ministers into the Church, without compelling them to acknowledge the invalidity of their former ordination; and it also proposed to allow certain ceremonial forms in public worship to be observed or omitted at discretion. This bill passed the House of Lords; but the Commons considered the question as more suitable for a convocation; and the Lords concurred in an address to the throne to that effect.