Many of those who had been the warmest advocates for non-resistance and passive obedience, made no scruple of renouncing their allegiance to king James, and complying with the present act, after having declared that they took the oaths in no other sense than that of a peaceable submission to the powers that were.

They even affirmed that the legislature itself had allowed the distinction between a king _de facto_ and a king _de jure_, as they had dropped the word "rightful" when the form was under debate.

They alleged that as prudence obliged them to conform to the letter of the oath, so conscience required them to give it their own interpretation.

Nothing could be more infamous and of worse tendency than this practice of equivocating in the most sacred of all obligations.

It introduced a general disregard of oaths, which hath been the source of universal perjury and corruption.
Though this set of temporizers were bitterly upbraided both by the nonjurors and the papists, they all concurred in representing William as an enemy to the church; as a prince educated in the doctrines of Calvin, which he plainly espoused, by limiting his favour and preferment to such as were latitudinarians in religion, and by his abolishing episcopacy in Scotland.