Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/602

588 penalty. Any person sending a child abroad to be educated by catholics was liable to one hundred pounds penalty, all of which was to go to the informer. Every person who, within six months after reaching the age of eighteen, did not renounce his or her religion by signing a declaration against transubstantiation, invocation of saints, and the sacrifice of the saints, could not inherit any property, but it must go to the next protestant heir. No catholic was to be allowed to purchase any landed or household property, either in his own name or the name of another; and all catholics who did not assign a fitting maintenance to their children, so that they might receive a protestant education, were to be subjected to an order of the lord chancellor for the purpose. At the commencement of the reign of Anne, a similar act was passed for Ireland, where the population was chiefly catholic; and that the protestant dissenters of that country might not escape, the sacramental test was tacked to the act. These monstrous acts—passed simultaneously with, or after the Toleration Act—say very little for the real toleration of that age.



They were in fact, however, too brutal to be reduced to very extensive practice. In the last year of the reign of Anne, an act was passed to strengthen the old act against papist patrons presenting to church livings; and after the rebellion of 1715, compelling all papists of the age of twenty-one to register their names and estates, with their yearly rental, in books kept by the clerk of the peace in each county.

Two years after the act compelling catholics to have their children educated in protestantism, a similar act was passed relating to the Jews; which law, it is said, has never been repealed. In 1753 an act was passed permitting any Jew who had resided three years in England and Ireland to be naturalised, without taking the sacrament; but this raised such a clamour, that it was repealed the very next session. Yet all the time there was an act of 1740 in force, which allowed the naturalisation of any Jew who had lived seven years in any of our colonies, without being more than two months absent at any one time, and that without taking the sacrament, or repeating demands "upon the true faith of a Christian." All other foreigners were entitled to be naturalised by a similar residence in our colonies. In 1729 Quakers were admitted to make an affirmation instead of an oath in all cases; but were not to serve on juries in criminal cases, or to give evidence in such cases, or to hold any place of honour or profit under government. In 1728 the Indemnity Act was passed, which allowed persons who had accepted any office, for which they had not qualified themselves by taking the Test and Corporation Act, still to qualify themselves, and gave so much time as brought them within the next passing of such an act, which was passed every year, so that it amounted to a perfect neutralisation of the act, till the abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts altogether, a century later. In 1711 passed the celebrated act against occasional conformity; and in 1714 one for preventing the growth of schism; but these were deprived of their force by another act in 1718.

The condition of dissentere, however, continued most unenviable through all this period, down to the reign of