between the _old clergy_ who had
recently been mercilessly ejected by the _new_, who in their turn were
awaiting their fate. The conference was closed with arguments by the
weaker, and votes by the stronger. Many curious anecdotes of this
conference have come down to us. The presbyterians, in their last
struggle, petitioned for _indulgence_; but oppressors who had become
petitioners, only showed that they possessed no longer the means of
resistance. This conference was followed up by the _Act of Uniformity_,
which took place on Bartholomew day, August 24, 1652: an act which
ejected Calamy's two thousand ministers from the bosom of the
established church. Bartholomew day with this party was long paralleled,
and perhaps is still, with the dreadful French massacre of that fatal
saint's day. The calamity was rather, however, of a private than of a
public nature. The two thousand ejected ministers were indeed deprived
of their livings; but this was, however, a happier fate than what has
often occurred in these contests for the security of political power.
This _ejection_ was not like the expulsion of the Moriscoes, the best
and most useful subjects of Spain, which was a human sacrifice of half a
million of men, and the proscription of many Jews from that land of
Catholicism; or the massacre of thousands of Huguenots, and the
expulsion of more than a hundred thousand by Louis the Fourteenth from
France. The presbyterian divines were not driven from their fatherland,
and compelled to learn another language than their mother-tongue.
Destitute as divines, they were suffered to remain as citizens; and the
result was remarkable. These divines could not disrobe themselves of
their learning and their piety, while several of them were compelled to
become tradesmen: among these the learned Samuel Chandler, whose
literary productions are numerous, kept a bookseller's shop in the
Poultry.

Hard as this event proved in its result, it was, however, pleaded, that
"It was but like for like." And that the history of "the like" might not
be curtailed in the telling, opposed to Calamy's chronicle of the two
thousand ejected ministers stands another, in folio magnitude, of the
same sort of chronicle of the clergy of the Church of England, with a
title by no means less pathetic.

This is Walker's "Attempt towards recovering an Account of the Clergy of
the Church of England who were sequestered, harassed, &c., in the late
Times." Walker is him