They reserved their sharpest taunts for those divines who, having, in the days of the Exclusion Bill and the Rye House Plot, been distinguished by zeal for the divine and indefeasible right of the hereditary Sovereign, were now ready to swear fealty to an usurper.

Was this then the real sense of all those sublime phrases which had resounded during twenty-nine years from innumerable pulpits?
Had the thousands of clergymen, who had so loudly boasted of the unchangeable loyalty of their order, really meant only that their loyalty would remain unchangeable till the next change of fortune?
It was idle, it was impudent in them to pretend that their present conduct was consistent with their former language.

If any Reverend Doctor had at length been convinced that he had been in the wrong, he surely ought, by an open recantation, to make all the amends now possible to the persecuted, the calumniated, the murdered defenders of liberty.

If he was still convinced that his old opinions were sound, he ought manfully to cast in his lot with the nonjurors.

Respect, it was said, is due to him who ingenuously confesses an error; respect is due to him who courageously suffers for an error; but it is difficult to respect a minister of religion who, while asserting that he still adheres to the principles of the Tories, saves his benefice by taking an oath which can be honestly taken only on the principles of the Whigs.
These reproaches, though perhaps not altogether unjust, were unseasonable.