[Footnote 3: The Act of Uniformity, passed May 19, 1662, withheld promotion in the Church from all who had not received episcopal ordination, and required of all clergy assent to the contents of the Prayer Book on pain of being deprived of their spiritual promotion. It forbade all changes in matters of belief otherwise than by the king in Parliament. While it barred the unconstitutional exercise of a dispensing power by the king, and kept the settlement of its faith out of the hands of the clergy and in those of the people, it was so contrived also according to the temper of the majority that it served as a test act for the English Hierarchy, and cast out of the Church, as Nonconformists, those best members of its Puritan clergy, about two thousand in number, whose faith was sincere enough to make them sacrifice their livings to their sense of truth.]
[Footnote 4: The Act of Toleration, with which Addison balances the Act of Uniformity, was passed in the first year of William and Mary, and confirmed in the 10th year of Queen Anne, the year in which this Essay was written. By it all persons dissenting from the Church of England, except Roman Catholics and persons denying the Trinity, were relieved from such acts against Nonconformity as restrained their religious liberty and right of public worship, on condition that they took the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, subscribed a declaration against transubstantiation, and, if dissenting ministers, subscribed also to certain of the Thirty-Nine Articles.]
[Footnote 5: The Act of Settlement was that which, at the Revolution, excluded the Stuarts and settled the succession to the throne of princes who have since governed England upon the principle there laid down, not of divine right, but of an original contract between prince and people, the breaking of which by the prince may lawfully entail forfeiture of the crown.]
[Footnote 6: James Stuart, son of James II, born June 10, 1688, was then in the 23rd year of his age.]
[Footnote 7: The 'Rehearsal' was a witty burlesque upon the heroic dramas of Davenant, Dryden, and others, written by George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the Zimri of Dryden's 'Absalom and Achitophel,' 'that life of pleasure and that soul of whim,' who, after running through a fortune of £50,000 a year, died, says Pope, 'in the worst inn's worst room.' His 'Rehearsal', written in 1663-4, was first acted in 1671. In the last act the poet Bayes, who is showing and explaining a Rehearsal of his play to Smith and Johnson, introduces an Eclipse which, as he explains, being nothing else but an interposition, &c.