; there
were the approving votes of the two Convocations; and it was much easier
to rail at Sherlock than to explain away either the treatise or the
votes. One writer maintained that by a thoroughly settled government
must have been meant a government of which the title was uncontested.
Thus, he said, the government of the United Provinces became a
settled government when it was recognised by Spain, and, but for that
recognition, would never have been a settled government to the end
of time. Another casuist, somewhat less austere, pronounced that a
government, wrongful in its origin, might become a settled government
after the lapse of a century. On the thirteenth of February 1789,
therefore, and not a day earlier, Englishmen would be at liberty to
swear allegiance to a government sprung from the Revolution. The history
of the chosen people was ransacked for precedents. Was Eglon's a settled
government when Ehud stabbed him? Was Joram's a settled government when
Jehe shot him? But the leading case was that of Athaliah. It was indeed
a case which furnished the malecontents with many happy and pungent
allusions; a kingdom treacherously seized by an usurper near in blood
to the throne; the rightful prince long dispossessed; a part of the
sacerdotal order true, through many disastrous years, to the Royal
House; a counterrevolution at length effected by the High Priest at the
head of the Levites. Who, it was asked, would dare to blame the heroic
pontiff who had restored the heir of David? Yet was not the government
of Athaliah as firmly settled as that of the Prince of Orange?

Hundreds of pages written at this time about the rights of Joash and the
bold enterprise of Jehoiada are mouldering in the ancient bookcases of
Oxford and Cambridge. While Sherlock was thus fiercely attacked by
his old friends, he was not left unmolested by his old enemies. Some
vehement Whigs, among whom Julian Johnson was conspicuous, declared that
Jacobitism itself was respectable when compared with the vile doctrine
which had been discovered in the Convocation Book. That passive
obedience was due to Kings was doubtless an absurd and pernicious
notion. Yet it was impossible not to respect the consistency and
fortitude of men who thought themselves bound to bear true allegiance,
at all hazards, to an unfortunate, a deposed, an exiled oppressor. But
the theory which Sherlock had learned from Overall was unmixed baseness
and wickedness. A cause was to