At last the fire was checked by blowing up a number of houses with gunpowder. The wind fell, and on Wednesday morning the fire ceased, “as it were by a command from Heaven.” It began at Pudding Lane, and it ended at Pie Corner in Giltspur Street. Actually 13,000 houses and 89 churches were burnt down, but only fourteen persons were killed. Every dwelling and building over an area of 436 acres was destroyed. The fire, however, was a blessing in disguise, for it swept away the foul courts and alleys and destroyed the plague germs lingering in the soil. Wider and more open streets were built, and new and stately churches arose. The genius of Sir Christopher Wren was afforded a unique opportunity. He re-created St. Paul’s, his chief monument, and erected fifty-four churches, each with its own special features, yet all in harmony with the great mother-church of the city. The restoration of Charles was a triumph for the Church of England, and marked the downfall of that religious toleration which Cromwell had established. At the instigation of Clarendon, the only man of real zeal and probity about the king, the Cavalier Parliament passed a series of spiteful Acts against the Puritans, or Nonconformists, as they may now be called. Henceforth all mayors, aldermen, councillors, and other borough officers must renounce the Solemn League and Covenant, deny the lawfulness of taking up arms against the king, and receive the sacrament according to the rites of the Church of England. This harsh and unfair Act was a great blow to the Nonconformists, and it practically drove them out of local government. They were next excluded from the Church by the Act of Uniformity; and then the expelled ministers began to form congregations outside the pale. But a new Act of Parliament forbidding the holding of all religious services except those of the Church of England, under pain of fine and imprisonment, was speedily passed to keep them forcibly within the fold. This shocking law actually made family worship a crime if more than five persons not belonging to the family were present. Then came another Act which forbade ministers expelled under the Act of Uniformity from teaching in a school or living within five miles of a city or corporate town. Thus the Church system which Laud had lost his head in trying to establish in the reign of Charles the First became the law of the land by the will of the people in the reign of his indifferent and cynical son.