The men who could not take the oath were, many of them, among the most distinguished churchmen of the time.

Great ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of Canterbury and one of the seven who had gained immortality by his resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of Bath and Wells, scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men like Charles Leslie, born with a genius for recrimination; much, it is clear, of what was best in the Church of England was to be found amongst them.

There is not a little of beauty, and much of pathos in their history.

Most, after their deprivation, were condemned to poverty; few of them recanted.

The lives of men like Sancroft and Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are part of the great Anglican tradition of earnest simplicity which later John Keble was to illustrate for the nineteenth century.