cours the silver cup in vain.

This Act, thus originated, which lingered in the Statute Book till the
reign of George IV., which even thoroughly religious men could be so
blinded by their prejudices as to defend, and which even such friends of
toleration as Lord Mansfield could declare to be a 'bulwark of the
Constitution,'[389] put occasional conformity into a very different
position from that which it would naturally take. Henceforth no
Dissenter could communicate in the parish churches of his country
without incurring some risk of an imputation which is especially
revolting to all feelings alike of honour and religion. He might have it
cast in his teeth that he was either committing or countenancing the
sacrilegious hypocrisy, the base and shuffling trick, of communicating
only to qualify for office.

It is needless here to enter into the details of the excited and
discreditable agitation by which the custom of occasional conformity was
at length, for a time, defeated. The contest may be said to have begun
in 1697, when Sir Humphrey Edwin, upon his election as Lord Mayor, after
duly receiving the Sacrament according to the use of the Church of
England, proceeded in state to the Congregational Chapel at Pinner's
Hall.[390] Exactly the same thing recurred in 1701, in the case of Sir
T. Abney.[391] The practice thus publicly illustrated was passionately
opposed both by strict Dissenters and by strict Churchmen. De Foe, as a
representative of the former, inveighed against it with great
bitterness, as perfectly scandalous, and altogether unjustifiable.[392]
The High Church party, on their side, reprobated it with no less
severity. A bill to prevent the practice was at once prepared. In spite
of the strength of the Tory and High Church reaction, the Whig party in
the House of Lords, vigorously supported by the Liberal Bishops, just
succeeded in throwing it out. A conference was held between the two
houses, 'the most crowded that ever had been known--so much weight was
laid on this matter on both sides,'[393] with a similar result. The
Commons made other endeavours to carry the Act in a modified form, and
with milder penalties; a somewhat unscrupulous minority made an attempt
to tack it to a money bill, and so effect their purpose by a manoeuvre.
The Sacheverell episode fanned the strange excitement that prevailed. A
large body of the country gentry and country clergy imagined that the
destinies of the Church hung in the b