[132] Entering Book, April 13. The following entry appears on the 20th:—“The Lords have sent down their Bill for uniting Protestant subjects to the Commons, and the Commons have yet before them a Bill of their own, both for the uniting of Protestant subjects and for giving indulgence to those that cannot be comprehended. The Commons’ Bill for ease and indulgence was on Monday, the 15th, ordered to be read a second time this day fortnight.”
[133] April 13. Parl. Hist., v. 217. The following passage occurs in the Entering Book, 217, Wednesday, May 15:—“Commons proceeded upon their Indulgence and Toleration Bill for Dissenters. The anti-interest seemed to be that day very calm and mild; and Sir Thomas Clarges took notice that the Lords’ Bill for Indulgence seemed very grateful to those whom it most concerned, and he was very well content it might pass. Yet he thought fit the House of Commons’ own Indulgence Bill should also be committed, and both of the Bills being committed, they might take anything that was good out of their own Bill and insert it into the Lords’ Bill. Of this opinion was Mr. Sacheverel.” It is added, “The Commons’ Bill has one excellent passage in it that is not in the Lords’ Bill, i.e. it repeals all the penal statutes against the Protestant Dissenters, when the Lords’ Bill does only suspend them, and restrain them to that matter of meetings alone, but leaves them in force upon all other accounts.”
[134] The Lords’ Bill for uniting their Majesty’s Protestant subjects will be printed in the Appendix.
[135] “The party which was now beginning to be formed against the Government pretended great zeal for the Church, and declared their apprehension that it was in danger; which was imputed by many to the Earl of Nottingham.”—Birch’s Tillotson, 178.
[136] Reresby, 390.
[137] Burnet, ii. 11.
[138] Somerville’s Political Transactions, 275: Smith’s remarks—Lathbury’s Nonjurors, 158.
[139] Ralph, ii. 73.
[140] Life, by Matthew Henry, 181.
[141] There were laymen who longed for Comprehension; but they looked with suspicion upon the proceedings of the Lower House. “The truth of the story,” says one of them, “is that neither House of Parliament was able to reform any one thing that was amiss in the State. And the House of Commons was stronger by eighty or one hundred voices to reform things amiss in the State than in the Church, and therefore, in such a juncture as this, none but malicious enemies and weak friends to Dissenters would bring in any Bill for the uniting or giving impunity to Dissenters, because all wise men knew they would be prostituted and made ineffectual to their end, and were intended so to be by those cunning men that brought them in, or influenced others so to do, so that all true friends to the Reformation or to the uniting of Protestants would fain have them laid aside, at least till a better opportunity.”—April, 1689. Entering Book, 534.