itted to any office, civil, military, ecclesiastical, or academical,
without taking the oaths to William and Mary. It was also unanimously
agreed that every person who already held any civil or military office
should be ejected from it, unless he took the oaths on or before the
first of August 1689. But the strongest passions of both parties
were excited by the question whether persons who already possessed
ecclesiastical or academical offices should be required to swear fealty
to the King and Queen on pain of deprivation. None could say what might
be the effect of a law enjoining all the members of a great, a powerful,
a sacred profession to make, under the most solemn sanction of
religion, a declaration which might be plausibly represented as a formal
recantation of all that they had been writing and preaching during many
years. The Primate and some of the most eminent Bishops had already
absented themselves from Parliament, and would doubtless relinquish
their palaces and revenues, rather than acknowledge the new Sovereigns.
The example of these great prelates might perhaps be followed by
a multitude of divines of humbler rank, by hundreds of canons,
prebendaries, and fellows of colleges, by thousands of parish priests.
To such an event no Tory, however clear his own conviction that he might
lawfully swear allegiance to the King who was in possession, could
look forward without the most painful emotions of compassion for the
sufferers and of anxiety for the Church.

There were some persons who went so far as to deny that the Parliament
was competent to pass a law requiring a Bishop to swear on pain of
deprivation. No earthly power, they said, could break the tie which
bound the successor of the apostles to his diocese. What God had joined
no man could sunder. Dings and senates might scrawl words on parchment
or impress figures on wax; but those words and figures could no more
change the course of the spiritual than the course of the physical
world. As the Author of the universe had appointed a certain order,
according to which it was His pleasure to send winter and summer,
seedtime and harvest, so He had appointed a certain order, according to
which He communicated His grace to His Catholic Church; and the latter
order was, like the former, independent of the powers and principalities
of the world. A legislature might alter the flames of the months, might
call June December, and December June; but, in spite of the leg