Added to this, another and a far more important bill was introduced:—“A Bill for the Uniformity of Public Prayers and Administration of the Sacraments.” The bill was first submitted to Parliament in December 1661, and became law on the 19th of May 1662. During this interval of five months the greatest excitement prevailed throughout the nation. Loud and fierce were the diatribes uttered from the Episcopal pulpit against Roundheads, Anabaptists, and Quakers. Swarms of pamphlets and broadsides were issued, to support Church and State by argument, but more frequently by ridicule and satire. Many of these, as “Noctroft’s Maid Whipt,” and the “Antidote of Melancholy made up in Pills,” were coarse and filthy in a high degree. Of course, sharp and bitter things were said and written on the Nonconformists’ side, but in none of their publications is there anything like the abominable and indecent scurrility which the royalist press published against them. Before giving a synopsis of the Act of Uniformity, it may be well to say, that the Book of Common Prayer, which it mentions, was the book as revised by Convocation in November 1661. About six hundred alterations had been made in the body of the volume. Forms respecting the weather, prayers to be used at sea, and emendations in the commination, and in the churching of women services were introduced. The calendar was revised, and the Apocrypha appointed to be read in the daily lessons. The absolution was to be pronounced by the “priest,” instead of by the “minister.” In the Litany, the words “rebellion and schism” were added to the petition against sedition; and the words, “bishops, priests, and deacons,” were substituted for “bishops, pastors, and ministers of the Church.” A few new collects were added, and, in one of them, a new epithet was added to the title of Charles I., he being styled “our most religious king.” None of these things were calculated to make the prayer-book more palatable to the Presbyterian and Dissenting parties, and hence the terrible rupture occasioned by the passing of the Act of Uniformity.