In 1665 the plague broke out in London, and swept away one hundred thousand of the inhabitants. The poltroon ministers in the city churches fled, and the ejected ministers re-entered the forsaken pulpits, and tried to benefit the terror-stricken people, whom the new-fledged parsons had cowardly left to the pestilence and the devil. The parliament, frightened from London, met in Oxford; but there, instead of showing kindness to the men who were so bravely doing duty in the city of the plague, they actually added injury to injury, by passing the execrable “Five Mile Act,” which provided that it should be a penal offence for any Nonconformist minister to teach in a school, or to come within five miles (except as a traveller in passing) of any city, borough, or corporate town, or of any place in which he had preached or taught since the passing of the Act of Uniformity, unless he had previously taken the oath of non-resistance—to wit, that it is not lawful, under any pretence whatever, to take arms against the king, or against those that are commissioned by him, or to endeavour to make any alteration of the government, either in Church or State. What was the result of all this? An amount of suffering was endured far greater than had been inflicted, in the same space of time, since the days of the Reformation. Jeremy White collected a list of the names of Nonconformist sufferers, amounting to sixty thousand, and he states that of these sufferers five thousand died in prison. Informers skulked about cottages, garrets, back rooms, stables, and outhouses, wherever they suspected a handful of quiet Christians might be assembled to hear the word of life from the lips of an old pastor; and despite curtains, shutters, trap-doors, and other simple devices to ensure safety, seized on their hapless victims, and dragged them before merciless magistrates, who, with savage joy, doomed them to deep, dark prisons. Some, in search of godly quietude, wandered far away, others secreted themselves in fields and woods, but the more daring remained in their former dwellings, and met to worship God, in consequence of which they were led off to prison. Students, deprived of all means of subsistence, had to lay aside their books, take up the spindle, earn a few pence at knitting, and live on the coarsest fare. Closets, beds, tubs, hay-ricks, and other places of concealment were haunted by ruffian soldiers, pointing a musket at the door, or thrusting a sword into the straw. Troopers made no scruple of rushing into a good man’s house, while he was at prayer, and of threatening, while holding a pistol at his head, to blow out his brains, unless he ceased from his whining cant.