into operation, in 1672. He then took out a license to preach, and commenced his public ministerial labours as a dissenting pastor, in a thatched house at Greenacres. He was shortly afterwards accommodated with a room in a dwelling-house of the better sort, and he continued his sacred services till the death of his wife, who was buried at Oldham, March 29, 1695. This event induced him to remove to Manchester, where he spent the remainder of his life, and dying in December, 1699, was buried in Oldham, on the 14th of that month**

Mr. Loben, who seems to have been the successor of Mr. Constantine in the curacy, being incapable of enduring the privation to which he was subjected on account of his alleged leanings towards Presbyterianism, and disinclined to render himself any longer liable to the rigours of the law, fully conformed in every particular to the requirements of the church, in 1664. He could not remain the clergyman here long, for in the year named a Rev. Mr. Wallworke is entered in the registers as the minister. Mr. Wallworke was probably a member of the yeomanry family of Wallworke, of Royton. He was succeeded in the ministry about 1673, by the Rev. Isaac Harpur, clerk, of Hunt-lane, Chadderton. This incumbent was most active in his spiritual duties, and secured the esteem of his diocesan, by his attention of the aifairs of the parish. At the period under notice, great animosity prevailed betwixt the Episcopalians and the Dissenters, - the doctrine of passive obedience to the crown had become the favourite theme of the church pulpit, and served to give a keener feature to the other sources of dissatisfaction, which existed on the part of the Nonconformists. Mr. Harpur.

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** In the work from which a number of the facts stated above are extracted, the thatched house in which Mr. Constantine is stated to have preached at Greenacres, is said to be three miles from Oldham;. and however improbable the statement may appear it is not so far from the fact, the main road from Oldham to Greenacres at that time having passed by the Red Lion, Bottom-of-moor, to Vineyard and Newearth, through Roe-lane to Lees, and thence to Hey, Waterhead-mill, and round to Greenacres - a route sufficiently circuitous to justify the assertion of its being three miles.