The previous Sunday had been a day such as England never knew, either before or since.[2] Hundreds of faithful ministers on that day preached farewell sermons to heart-broken, weeping flocks. Churches were crowded; aisles and stairs were crammed to suffocation; and people clung to the open windows like swarms of bees. It would have been pardonable if the ministers had mingled with the loving exhortations addressed to the distressed crowds before them sentiments of indignation at the legislative act which was the means of their removal. But, instead of that, the discourses were as calm as the pastors had ever preached, and some of them scarcely alluded to the peculiar circumstances of the time. ----- Footnote 2: And yet, perhaps this is hardly true. A most pitiful picture might be drawn of the clergymen who, twenty years previously, had been expelled from the same churches by the _ipse dixit_ of Oliver Cromwell, whom Bishop Hackett represents as regarding neither parliaments nor patents—neither canons nor scriptures—“in comparison of some new light shining in the lantern of his own head.” Men of learning and religion were in many instances succeeded by “mere rhapsodists and ramblers,” “cried up as rare soul-saving preachers.” Not a few venerable and worthy ministers, expelled by the rough hand of violence, “lingered out their lives, laden and almost oppressed, worried, and worn out with fears, anxieties, necessities, rude affronts, and remediless afflictions.” A great deal may be said on both sides of the question. ----- A week after, on the day after Queen Catherine’s jubilant reception, the Act of Uniformity was enforced in all its rigour, and upwards of two thousand ministers, with their families, were ejected from their livings.[3] ----- Footnote 3: Baxter estimates the number of the ejected and deprived as from 1800 to 2000. Calamy gives it at 2400. A catalogue in Dr Williams’s library gives 2257. A manuscript, by Oliver Heywood, gives 2500. ----- “What a scene,” says John Wesley, “is opened here. The poor Nonconformists were used without either justice or mercy; and many of the Protestant bishops of King Charles had neither more religion nor humanity than the Popish bishops of Queen Mary.”[4] “By this Act of Uniformity, thousands of men, guilty of no crime,—nothing contrary either to justice, mercy, or truth,—were stripped of all they had—of their houses, lands, revenues—and driven to seek where they could, or beg their bread. For what? Because they did not dare to worship God according to other men’s consciences!”[5] ----- Footnote 4: Wesley’s Works, vol. ii. p. 297. Footnote 5: _Ibid._, vol. xi. p. 37. -----