of a few of them. For religious rage ceas'd in England with the civil wars; and was no more under queen Anne, than the hollow noise of a sea whose billows still heav'd, tho' so long after the storm, when the Whigs and Tories laid waste their native country, in the same manner as the Guelphs and Gibelins formerly did theirs. 'Twas absolutely necessary for both parties to call in religion on this occasion; the Tories declar'd for episcopacy, and the Whigs, as some imagin'd, were for abolishing it; however, after these had got the upper hand, they contented themselves with only abridging it.
At the time when the earl of Oxford and the lord Bolingbroke us'd to drink healths to the Tories, the Church of England confider'd those noblemen as the defenders of it's holy privileges. The lower house of Convocation (a kind of house of Commons) compos'd wholly of the clergy, was in some credit at that time; at least the members of it had the liberty to meet, to dispute on ecclesiastical matters, to sentence impious
