in my not having fallen, yet I will take all the shame of my fall to myself, that I may give Thee glory; and though I cannot now rejoice in my innocence, I desire to cause joy in heaven (and if Thou pleasest, many penitents on earth) by my repentance."1 No one who is at the trouble of perusing this tedious composition can doubt the sincerity of the writer, but nobody of common sense can fail to perceive his weakness, not to speak of the mischief he did to morality and religion by exaggerations of minor casuistical points. For though this man mentions his "first dismal step of taking the sacred name of God in vain," he does not dwell upon the sin of perjury, but expatiates upon the wickedness of having connived at, though he never used, the prayers introduced at the Revolution.

Another clergyman did what was still more astonishing: he publicly retracted his oath, and preached upon the words: "I have sinned greatly in that I have done; and now, I beseech Thee, O Lord, take away the iniquity of Thy servant; for I have done very foolishly," at the same time he exhorted his congregation to renew their allegiance to James, for whom, as the King of England, and for his family, he publicly prayed. Such an act was downright rebellion, and no wonder the man got into trouble. Being tried for his offence, he was sentenced to stand in the pillory and to pay a fine of £200; but the Government wisely treated him as a lunatic, and offered a pardon if he would confess his fault. This he declined to do; consequently he remained in confinement.

Not only did other clergymen retract compliance, but a layman who had qualified himself for office by taking the oaths, solemnly, on his death-bed, in the presence of witnesses, signed a declaration of penitence. The political

feeling mixed up with the confession is plain, and all these people, while professing the utmost piety, proved themselves to be unfaithful subjects.

The political views of the Nonjurors were narrow in the extreme, and though to be irreligious was a thing they dreaded most of all, their views of the State were of a very irreligious kind. They took away from it all moral and religious life, and if they consistently followed out their own theory, they took away all conscience from the subjects of a legitimate and anointed King. Their system exalted such a person to the highest point of favour, and degraded the people to the lowest step of slavery. Denuding them of political rights, they denied them political duties, and annihilated all their political responsibilities. In the death-blow aimed at popular power, morality and religion, in reference to political life, were blindly smitten. Yet whilst their creed only left scope for patience in suffering, numbers of them did not practice this patience, but were everlastingly plotting a counter-revolution. To them the State appeared as an instrument in the hands of the Church-to be controlled for its use, to afford revenues for its support, to supply means for the enforcement of its laws. The civil power, according to their theory, has been described as "a body constituted, it would seem, of three principal elements-an absolute king, money-bags, and a hangman."1 It must be said, to the credit of the Nonjurors, that however slavishly loyal to an absolute king, they showed an indifference to the "money-bags" and a contempt for the "hangman"—a fact worthy of imitation by some who entertain a different theory from them.

To Sancroft, the Nonjurors, the ecclesiastical Tories

1 Maurice's Kingdom of Christ, iii. 105.

of the period, and all men of that stamp who clung to the notion of the divine right of kings, may be applied the remark: "The great crises in the history of nations have often been met by a sort of feminine positiveness and a more obstinate reassertion of principles which have lost their hold upon a nation. The fixed ideas of a reactionary politician may be compared to madness. He grows more and more convinced of the truth of his notions as he becomes more isolated, and would rather await the inevitable than in any degree yield to circumstances." 1

The Nonjuring movement took a narrow and troublesome political form, yet, notwithstanding all we have said, it was animated by an intensely religious spirit. This movement did not proceed from any principle founded upon reason, observation, or experience, but from a theological dogma about the divine right of kings, and the consequent duty, religious as it appeared to them, that subjects should unresistingly obey the Lord's annointed. The scheme tended to the political enslavement of the country; it sapped the liberties of our constitution; yet it appears to have been an honest endeavour-prejudiced and ignorant, still an honest endeavour-to serve God: one of a multitude of instances in which false opinions have perverted true sentiments, and good motives have given sincerity and disinterestedness to bad actions. No philosophy of history, but one so wretchedly narrow as to forfeit all title to the name, will deny the co-existence of right and wrong in the same men, however hard it may be to untie the knot between them.

High Church theology of the Thorndike type had no adequate representative amongst the Nonjurors. They

1 Jowett's Dialogues of Plato, ii. Introduction, 150. I have changed the word" statesman" for " politician."

included no one of intellectual mark. Bull, the most distinguished scholar and the ablest divine of the old Anglican school, remained in the Establishment; so did all the chief theologians who leaned in the same direction with him. But High Church sentiment of the Laudean order, and such as belonged to Cosin and Seth Ward, drained off almost entirely into Nonjuring channels. The Nonjurors also went beyond their predecessors in this respect. They cast off all the Erastian trammels which were willingly worn by the Bishops of the Restoration.

Gladly would the Nonjurors have wrought out a method of parochial discipline which would have kept in order not merely such religionists as agreed in their views, but the population at large, reducing everybody to a Procrustean bed of belief and practice. No Presbyterians under the Commonwealth could have been more rigorous apostles of uniformity than the Nonjurors would have proved, had they but obtained permission to do as they pleased. They would have gone beyond their predecessors; for though Milton says presbyter is priest writ large, a mere presbyter has not the same element of despotic force at his command as is possessed by the genuine priest. The priest, as a steward of mystical sacraments, becomes more potent than preacher or pastor. He is constituted lord of a domain beyond the borders of reason and moral authority; he carries keys which open and shut what the superstitious imagine to be gates of heaven. The Nonjurors were priests, not with limitations, like some of their episcopalian brethren, but out and out. Their ministers offered sacrifice upon an altar, they did not merely commemorate one at the Lord's-table. Laymen imbibed their viewsthey were maintained by Robert Nelson.1

1 Nelson's Christian Sacrifice.

As to modes of worship, the Nonjurors were in circumstances which precluded ritualistic magnificence. They were proscribed, as Nonconformist confessors had been, and therefore were forced to serve God in obscurity. Cathedrals and churches were closed against themthey were driven into barns and garrets. Pomp, such as is now so fashionable, was to them an impossibility; not that I find them manifesting any cravings in that direction. They did not follow Archbishop Laud. High sacramental views are by no means necessarily connected with Ritualism. Ritualism may be purely æsthetical, and quite separate from peculiar doctrinal opinions; at the same time a belief in the Real presence and in the Sacrifice of the Lord's Supper may wear an outward form not more artistic than that which obtains in a Dissenting meeting-house.1

With all the political and ecclesiastical passions of that age, there existed comparatively little of what may be properly called religious excitement. The principal amount of religious excitement in the reign of William III. must not be sought in the Established Church, or amongst Presbyterians, Independents, or Baptists. It must be divided between Nonjurors and Quakers. Dismissing the latter for the present, it may be said that the former exhibited abundant enthusiasm. Hickes was as much a spiritual fanatic as any of the Presbyterian army chaplains, or any of Cromwell's troopers. Some who reviled the madness of the sects during the Civil Wars and the

In the Vernon Correspondence, vol. ii. 55, allusions occur to "one of the Prebends of Durham," a Nonjuror in heart, suspected of Jacobitism. "By what I have now heard," says Vernon to the Duke of Shrewsbury, "there never was so

true a pharisee; he was affectedly devout in outward show, using all the ceremonies both of the Greek and Western Churches; his practice was to pray and sing psalms while he and his friends were travelling in his coach."