34 INTRODUCTORY. 



rivalling each other in extravagance and offensiveness ? There 

 are many organisations of Christians, now staid and decorous, 

 who offended the common decencies of life by their grotesque 

 fanaticism, notably the Quakers. There were sects whose 

 frenzy was a danger to all government, sects whose tenets were 

 a menace to all morality, such as the Levellers and the Fami- 

 lists. Now the theory of government in those days by no means 

 accepted the rights of individual conscience in matters of belief. 

 It held that it was the duty and privilege of the state to define 

 the religion of the subject ; and if the policy of the common- 

 wealth proscribed episcopacy, it did so because it conceived that 

 form of Church government to be scripturally unsound and poli- 

 tically mischievous. It certainly did not adopt Presbyterianism 

 because it wished to conciliate the Scotch, especially after 

 Dunbar ; and indeed the Presbyterian party had a good deal to 

 do with the restoration of Charles. 



Whatever may now be thought of the Clarendon code and 

 the Act of Uniformity, the historian who watches, as best he 

 may, the tone of thought which prevailed at the time, will see 

 in this memorable legislation the opinion which was then 

 current that the state must put an end to religious chaos. 

 The code was as severe and harsh as the discipline of the old 

 High Commission Court, and the code was not allowed to 

 sleep. The Act of Uniformity, with the revised Prayer-book 

 appended to it, contained innovations which, in a less excited 

 and less reactionary time, would have been seriously criticised ; 

 and the revision of the Prayer-book was carried out by means 

 which would have been strenuously resisted bya past generation 

 of statesmen, even by the royalists of the Civil War. 



Parliament designed to revise the Prayer-book itself. This is 

 clear if one inspects the Journals of the House of Commons 

 for July 3 and July 9, 1661, the House being prorogued (the 

 Journals say adjourned) on July loth. During the recess, the king 

 invited the two Convocations to revise the Liturgy, and to report 

 to him, a proceeding which would have been most emphatically 

 resented a generation before, as an utterly unconstitutional course 



