Since Kiffin could not be seduced by blandishments and fair promises, it was determined to try what persecution would effect. He was told that an information would be filed against him in the Crown Office, and he was threatened with a lodging in Newgate. He asked the advice of the counsel; and the answer which he received was that, by accepting office without taking the sacrament according to the Anglican ritual, he would make himself legally liable to a fine of five hundred pounds, but that, by refusing office, he would make himself liable, not legally, but in fact, to whatever fine a servile bench of judges might in direct defiance of the statutes, think fit to impose. He might be mulcted in ten, twenty, thirty, thousand pounds. His family, which had already suffered so cruelly from two confiscations, might be utterly ruined by this third calamity. After holding out so many weeks, he so far submitted as to take the tile of Alderman; but he abstained from acting either as a justice of the Peace or as one of the Commission of Lieutenancy which commanded the militia of the City.[1]
That section of the dissenting body which was favourable to the King's new policy had from the first been a minority, and soon began to diminish. For the Nonconformists perceived in no long time that their spiritual privileges had been abridged rather than extended by the Indulgence. The chief characteristic of the Puritan was abhorrence of the peculiarities of the Church of Rome. He had quitted the Church of England only because he conceived that she too much resembled her superb and voluptuous sister, the sorceress of the golden cup and of the scarlet robe. He now found that one of the implied conditions of that alliance which some of his pastors had formed with the Court was that the religion of the Court should be respectfully and tenderly treated. He soon began to regret the days of persecution. While the penal laws were enforced, he had heard the words of life in secret and at his peril: but still he had heard them. When the brethren were assembled in the inner chamber, when the sentinels had been posted, when the doors had been locked, when the preacher, in the garb of a butcher or a drayman, had
- ↑ Kiffin's Memoirs.
