ntry into
sympathy with the clergy, and at the Restoration the church had the hold
upon the affection of the laity which it lacked under the Laudian rule.

The Restoration period.

On the king's restoration the survivors of the ejected clergy quietly
regained their benefices. The Presbyterians helped to bring back the
king and looked for a reward. Charles II. promised them a limited
episcopacy and other concessions, but his plan was rejected by the
Commons. A conference at the Savoy between leading Presbyterians and
churchmen in 1661 was ineffectual, and a revision of the prayer-book by
convocation further discontented nonconformists. The parliament of 1661
was violently anti-Puritan, and in 1662 passed an Act of Uniformity
providing that all ministers not episcopally ordained or refusing to
conform should be deprived on St Bartholomew's day, the 14th of August
following. About 2000 ministers are said to have been ejected, and in
1665 ejected ministers were forbidden to come within five miles of their
former cures. Though some bishops and clergy showed kindness to the
ejected, churchmen generally approved of this oppressive legislation;
they could not forget the wrongs inflicted on their church by the once
triumphant Puritans. Nonconformist worship was made punishable by fine
and imprisonment, and on the third offence by transportation. In 1672
Charles, who had secretly promised the French king openly to profess
Roman Catholicism, issued a Declaration of Indulgence which applied both
to Romanists and Protestant Nonconformists, but parliament compelled him
to withdraw it, and, in 1673, passed a Test Act making reception of the
holy communion and a denial of transubstantiation necessary
qualifications for public office. Later, when the dissenters found
friends among the party in parliament opposed to the crown, the church
supported the king, and the doctrine of passive obedience was generally
accepted by the clergy. The church was popular, and among the great
preachers and theologians who adorned it in the Caroline period were
Jeremy Taylor, Pearson, Bull, Barrow, South and Stillingfleet. The lower
clergy were mostly poor, and their social position was consequently
often humble, but the pictures of clerical humiliation after 1660 are
generally overcoloured; the assertion that they commonly married
servants or cast-off mistresses of their patrons has been disproved, and
it is certain that men of good family entered ho