It
bears the appearance of mitigating the former persecuting laws; but if
we may judge by the spirit which had broken out almost every session
during this parliament, it was not intended as any favor to the
nonconformists. Experience probably had taught, that laws over rigid and
severe could not be executed. By this act, the hearer in a conventicle
(that is, in a dissenting assembly, where more than five were present,
besides the family) was fined five shillings for the first offence, ten
for the second; the preacher, twenty pounds for the first offence,
forty for the second. The person in whose house the conventicle met, was
amerced a like sum with the preacher. One clause is remarkable; that if
any dispute should arise the judges should always explain the doubt in
the sense least favorable to conventicles, it being the intention of
parliament entirely to suppress them. Such was the zeal of the commons,
that they violated the plainest and most established maxims of civil
policy, which require that in all criminal prosecutions favor should
always be given to the prisoner.
The affair of Skinner still remained a ground of quarrel between the two
houses; but the king prevailed with the peers to accept of the expedient
proposed by the commons, that a general razure should be made of all the
transactions with regard to that disputed question.
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