Resistance of such a pure and steady character, conducted with meek fortitude, and supported by unimpeachable wisdom, was too dangerous an offence to be forgiven. Ejection of the members from the scanty subsistence which they derived from their collegiate endowments, was the first punishment. To this, banishment from Oxford was immediately added, and, in many cases, imprisonment. The obnoxious oaths were tendered to all the members of the university, and those who refused to compromise their consciences for bread, were commanded to quit the happy asylum of their age, or to renounce all their youthful studies and hopes in twenty-four hours, by beat of drum, on pain of being treated as spies. Few were found so selfish as to submit to the alternative of perjury; and thus the venerable sages and generous youth of England went forth like the confessors of antient times, "of whom the world was not worthy; afflicted, destitute, tormented, they wandered in deserts, in mountains, in caves, and dens of the earth." At one time they were forbidden to earn a subsistence as private tutors in families; at others, restricted from performing any ministerial functions, even so much as administering the sacrament to dying persons, who yet, by the arbitrary regulations of many of the new parochial ministers, might not receive it from them, unless they also first took the covenant. Dignified clergymen were at this time travelling on foot, nearly destitute of common necessaries, and relying on the charity of casual passengers for support[1]. Cathedrals had long been converted into barracks for horse-soldiers, and bishop's palaces into prisons for the ejected clergy, whose families, now deprived of the last pittance, and actually in want of bread[2], became earnest supplicants that the moiety of the benefices, of which their fathers were deprived, (and which the Parliament had agreed should be appropriated to their support,) should be regularly paid. "But these applications oftener produced vexatious and expensive suits than effectual relief."