er. The year 1800, the year
1900, might find princes who derived their title from the votes of the
Convention reigning in peace and prosperity. No matter: they would still
be usurpers; and, if, in the twentieth or twenty-first century, any
person who could make out a better right by blood to the crown should
call on a late posterity to acknowledge him as King, the call must be
obeyed on peril of eternal perdition.

A Whig might well enjoy the thought that the controversies which had
arisen among his adversaries had established the soundness of his own
political creed. The disputants who had long agreed in accusing him of
an impious error had now effectually vindicated him, and refuted one
another. The High Churchman who took the oaths had shown by irrefragable
arguments from the Gospels and the Epistles, from the uniform practice
of the primitive Church, and from the explicit declarations of the
Anglican Church, that Christians were not in all cases bound to pay
obedience to the prince who had the hereditary title. The High Churchman
who would not take the oaths had shown as satisfactorily that Christians
were not in all cases bound to pay obedience to the prince who was
actually reigning. It followed that, to entitle a government to the
allegiance of subjects, something was necessary different from mere
legitimacy, and different also from mere possession. What that something
was the Whigs had no difficulty in pronouncing. In their view, the
end for which all governments had been instituted was the happiness of
society. While the magistrate was, on the whole, notwithstanding some
faults, a minister for good, Reason taught mankind to obey him;
and Religion, giving her solemn sanction to the teaching of Reason,
commanded mankind to revere him as divinely commissioned. But if
he proved to be a minister for evil, on what grounds was he to be
considered as divinely commissioned? The Tories who swore had proved
that he ought not to be so considered on account of the origin of his
power: the Tories who would not swear had proved as clearly that he
ought not to be so considered on account of the existence of his power.

Some violent and acrimonious Whigs triumphed ostentatiously and with
merciless insolence over the perplexed and divided priesthood. The
nonjuror they generally affected to regard with contemptuous pity as
a dull and perverse, but sincere, bigot, whose absurd practice was in
harmony with his absurd theory, and w