with the Oath of Allegiance, unless the Doctor can swear allegiance to him who is no King and hath no authority to govern.”  All this the Nonjurors would have admitted, and the mere fact that it could be used as argument against them is proof that they were out of touch with the national temper.  What they wanted was a legal revolution which is in the nature of things impossible.  We may regret that the oath was deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly pressed.  But the leaders of a revolution “tread a path of fire”; and the fault lay less at the door of the civil government than in the fact that this was an age when men acted on their principles.  William and his advisers, with the condition of Ireland and Scotland a cause for agitation, with France hostile, with treason and plot not absent from the episcopate itself, had no easy task; what, in the temper of the time, gives most cause for consideration, is the moderate spirit in which they accomplished it.

[Footnote 11:  A Vindication of their Majesties’ Authority to fill the Sees of the Deprived Bishops (1691).]

III

The Nonjuring schism was by no means the only difficulty which the Church of England had to confront in these troubled years.  The definition of her relationship with State and nation, if at the moment it aroused less bitterness, was in the long run more intricate in its nature.  That some sort of toleration was inevitable few, save a group of prejudiced irreconcilables, would have denied.  But greater things were in the air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would have been admitted to the Church.  It is this which explains the acrimonious debates of the next two years.  The hatred of the Church for dissent can only be understood by those who study with care the insults heaped upon her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars.  That men who had striven for her dissolution should be admitted to her privileges seemed to Churchmen as tragic as ironical.  Nor must we miss the political aspect of the matter.  William had received an eager, if natural, support from Nonconformists; and since the vast majority of them was Whig in temper, the greater the degree of toleration, the greater likelihood there was of an attack upon the Church.  Exclusion thus became a fundamental article of the Tory creed; and it was the more valued because it enabled them to strike at their opponents through an institution which at the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710, still showed an overwhelming hold upon the mass of the people.