Not one in fifty, therefore, of those laymen who disapproved of the Revolution thought himself bound to quit his pew in the old church, where the old liturgy was still read, and where the old vestments were still worn, and to follow the ejected priest to a conventicle, a conventicle, too, which was not protected by the Toleration Act.

Thus the new sect was a sect of preachers without hearers; and such preachers could not make a livelihood by preaching.

In London, indeed, and in some other large towns, those vehement Jacobites, whom nothing would satisfy but to hear King James and the Prince of Wales prayed for by name, were sufficiently numerous to make up a few small congregations, which met secretly, and under constant fear of the constables, in rooms so mean that the meeting houses of the Puritan dissenters might by comparison be called palaces.

Even Collier, who had all the qualities which attract large audiences, was reduced to be the minister of a little knot of malecontents, whose oratory was on a second floor in the city.

But the nonjuring clergymen who were able to obtain even a pittance by officiating at such places were very few.