§ 155.3. =The Restoration and the Act of Toleration.=--The Restoration of royalty under =Charles II.=, A.D. 1660-1685, began with the reinstating of the Episcopal church in all the privileges granted to it under Elizabeth. The Corporation Act of December, A.D. 1661, was the first of a series of enactments for this purpose. It required of all magistrates and civil officers that they should take an oath acknowledging the royal supremacy and communicate in the Episcopal church. The Act of Uniformity of May, A.D. 1662, was still more oppressive. It prohibited any clergyman entering the English pulpit or discharging any ministerial function, unless he had been ordained by a bishop, had signed the Thirty-nine Articles, and undertook to conduct worship exactly in accordance with the newly revised Book of Common Prayer. More than 2,000 Puritan ministers, who could not conscientiously submit to those terms, were driven out of their churches. Then in June, A.D. 1664, the Conventicle Act was renewed, enforcing attendance at the Episcopal church, and threatening with imprisonment or exile all found in any private religious meeting of more than five persons. In the following year the Five Mile Act inflicted heavy fines on all nonconformist ministers who should approach within five miles of their former congregation or indeed of any city. All these laws, although primarily directed against all Protestant dissenters, told equally against the Catholics, whom the king’s Catholic sympathies would willingly have spared. When now his league with Catholic France against the Protestant Netherlands made it necessary for him to appease his Protestant subjects, he hoped to accomplish this and save the Catholics by his “Declaration of Indulgence” of A.D. 1672, issued with the consent of Parliament, which suspended all penal laws hitherto in force against dissenters. But the Protestant nonconformists saw through this scheme, and the Parliament of A.D. 1673 passed the anti-Catholic Test Act (§ 153, 6). Equally vain were all later attempts to secure greater liberties and privileges to the Catholics. They only served to develop the powers of Parliament and to bring the Episcopalians and nonconformists more closely together. After spending his whole life oscillating between frivolous unbelief and Catholic superstition, Charles II., on his death-bed, formally went over to the Romish church, and had the communion and extreme unction administered by a Catholic priest. His brother and successor =James II.=, A.D. 1685-1688, who was from A.D. 1672 an avowed Catholic, sent a declaration of obedience to Rome, received a papal nuncio in London, and in the exercise of despotic power issued, in A.D. 1687, a “Declaration of Freedom of Conscience,” which, under the fair colour of universal toleration and by the setting aside of the test oath, enabled him to fill all civil and military offices with Catholics. This act proved equally oppressive to the Episcopalians and to Protestant dissenters. This intrigue cost him his throne. He had, as he himself said, staked three kingdoms on a mass, and lost all the three. =William III.= of Orange, A.D. 1689-1702, grandson of Charles I. and son-in-law of James II., gave a final decision to the rights of the national Episcopal church and the position of dissenters in the =Act of Toleration= of A.D. 1689, which he passed with consent of the Parliament. All penal laws against the latter were abrogated, and religious liberty was extended to all with the exception of Catholics and Socinians. The retention of the Corporation and Test Acts, however, still excluded them from the exercise of all political rights. They were also still obliged to pay tithes and other church dues to the Episcopal clergy of their dioceses, and their marriages and baptisms had to be administered in the parish churches. Their ministers were also obliged to subscribe the Thirty-nine Articles, with reservation of those points opposed to their principles. The Act of Union of A.D. 1707, passed under Queen Anne, a daughter of James II., which united England and Scotland into the one kingdom of Great Britain, gave legitimate sanction to a separate ecclesiastical establishment for each country. In Scotland the Presbyterian churches continued the established church, while the Episcopal was tolerated as a dissenting body. Congregationalism, however, has been practically limited to England and North America.[456]--Continuation, § 202, 5.