any office,
civil, military, or spiritual, should, on pain of deprivation, solemnly
abjure the exiled King; that the oath of abjuration might be tendered by
any justice of the peace to any subject of their Majesties; and that, if
it were refused, the recusant should be sent to prison, and should lie
there as long as he continued obstinate.

The severity of this last provision was generally and most justly
blamed. To turn every ignorant meddling magistrate into a state
inquisitor, to insist that a plain man, who lived peaceably, who obeyed
the laws, who paid his taxes, who had never held and who did not expect
ever to hold any office, and who had never troubled his head about
problems of political philosophy, should declare, under the sanction
of an oath, a decided opinion on a point about which the most learned
Doctors of the age had written whole libraries of controversial books,
and to send him to rot in a gaol if he could not bring himself to swear,
would surely have been the height of tyranny. The clause which required
public functionaries to abjure the deposed King was not open to the same
objections. Yet even against this clause some weighty arguments
were urged. A man, it was said, who has an honest heart and a sound
understanding is sufficiently bound by the present oath. Every such
man, when he swears to be faithful and to bear true allegiance to King
William, does, by necessary implication, abjure King James. There
may doubtless be among the servants of the State, and even among the
ministers of the Church, some persons who have no sense of honour or
religion, and who are ready to forswear themselves for lucre. There may
be others who have contracted the pernicious habit of quibbling away the
most sacred obligations of morality, and who have convinced themselves
that they can innocently make, with a mental reservation, a promise
which it would be sinful to make without such a reservation. Against
these two classes of Jacobites it is true that the present test affords
no security. But will the new test, will any test, be more efficacious?
Will a person who has no conscience, or a person whose conscience can be
set at rest by immoral sophistry, hesitate to repeat any phrase that you
can dictate? The former will kiss the book without any scruple at all.
The scruples of the latter will be very easily removed. He now swears
allegiance to one King with a mental reservation. He will then abjure
the other King with a