As the day fixed for the deprivation of the Bishops and Clergy, who could not take the Oath, drew near, many persons were anxious to devise means to prevent the schism, which, it was foreseen, would be produced: but nothing appears to have been seriously contemplated by the government. The complying Clergy in general were anxious that the Oath should not be pressed. Efforts were accordingly made to prevent a deprivation. In the Diocese of Norwich a proposal was made, which is thus described by its originator: "At a numerous meeting of the Clergy, I proposed that we should join in a petition to the government, that the rigour of the depriving Act might be mitigated, and our Bishop might be permitted to live and exercise his Episcopal function among us. To this all subscribed very freely, and among the rest, his Grace Dr. Sharp, the late excellent Archbishop of York, though then only Dean of Norwich: but because, if the Oaths were passed by, I supposed the government might justly demand some security for that Bishop's peaceable management in his diocese; therefore I proposed that the whole body of the Clergy there met should offer themselves to become sureties for their Bishop, which, though the rest were most of them afraid to do, that Bishop took my proposal so kindly, that he remembered it to the last, and has often assured me, that had we taken that course, it would have given such satisfaction as would have encouraged those of the other dioceses to have followed the example, and so every one of those holy fathers might have lived and dyed peaceably in their own dioceses: but the sins of an ungrateful nation were too great and too many for us to hope for such a blessing." The
