"If it be unlawful to succeed a deprived bishop," he wrote,[11] "then he is the bishop of the diocese still: and then the law that deprives him is no law, and consequently the king and Parliament that made that law no king and Parliament: and how can this be reconciled 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.