How then was it possible for such a divine to deny that obedience had been due to Cromwell, and yet to affirm that it was due to William?
To suppose that there could be such inconsistency without dishonesty would be not charity but weakness.
Those who were determined to comply with the Act of Parliament would do better to speak out, and to say, what every body knew, that they complied simply to save their benefices.

The motive was no doubt strong.
That a clergyman who was a husband and a father should look forward with dread to the first of August and the first of February was natural.

But he would do well to remember that, however terrible might be the day of suspension and the day of deprivation, there would assuredly come two other days more terrible still, the day of death and the day of judgment, [459] The swearing clergy, as they were called, were not a little perplexed by this reasoning.

Nothing embarrassed them more than the analogy which the nonjurors were never weary of pointing out between the usurpation of Cromwell and the usurpation of William.

For there was in that age no High Churchman who would not have thought himself reduced to an absurdity if he had been reduced to the necessity of saying that the Church had commanded her sons to obey Cromwell.