Such was the way in which the High Church party _began_ their campaign, and four months afterwards their representatives, in the House of Commons, brought in and passed their pet “Occasional Conformity Bill.” The Dissenters, at this period, were an influential and important community. They were, generally speaking, men of trade and industry, and the moneyed interests of England were, to a great extent, in their hands. Such was their consequence in the State, that, the parliamentary discussions of the “Occasional Conformity Bill” seriously influenced the money market, and the prices of stocks rose or fell just as the bill was likely to be passed or to be rejected.[169] And yet, notwithstanding their number and importance, they were, with a few exceptions, extremely reasonable in their demands. Defoe, himself a Dissenter,[170] expounds them in a pamphlet published at the time, and we presume that his exposition may be considered tolerably correct and just. He suggests that if Dissenters are to be excluded from all places of profit, trust, and honour, they ought to be excused from all places attended with charge, trouble, and loss of time; that if a Dissenter be pressed as a sailor to fight at sea, or be enlisted as a soldier to fight on shore, he ought not to be declared incapable of preferment; and that if Dissenters must not only maintain their own clergy and their own poor, but also join in maintaining the clergy and the poor of the Established Church,—if they must pay the same taxes and the same duties that Churchmen pay, it is somewhat hard that they are to be treated with so much suspicion as not to be thought worthy of being trusted to set a drunkard in the stocks.[171] ----- Footnote 169: Defoe’s _Dissenters’ Answer to the High Church Challenge_. Footnote 170: Defoe’s _Letter to John Howe_. Footnote 171: Defoe’s _Inquiry into Occasional Conformity_. ----- Defoe further declares, that, so far as it respects himself, he has not the least objection to the “Occasional Conformity Bill” becoming law. He has no notion of “Christians of an amphibious nature, who have such preposterous consciences that they can believe one way of worship to be right, and yet serve God another way themselves. This is a strange thing in Israel! It is like a ship with her sails set, some back and some full. It is like a workman that builds with one hand, and pulls down with another. It is like everything which signifies nothing. To say that a man can be of two religions is a contradiction, unless there be two Gods to worship, or he has two souls to save. If it be unlawful for me to dissent, I ought to conform; but if it be unlawful for me to conform, I must dissent. To say that you take the sacrament as a _civil act_ in a church, and as a _religious act_ in a chapel, is _playing bo—peep_ with God Almighty.”[172] ----- Footnote 172: _Ibid._ -----