anted was a legal revolution which
is in the nature of things impossible. We may regret that the oath was
deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly
pressed. But the leaders of a revolution "tread a path of fire"; and the
fault lay less at the door of the civil government than in the fact that
this was an age when men acted on their principles. William and his
advisers, with the condition of Ireland and Scotland a cause for
agitation, with France hostile, with treason and plot not absent from
the episcopate itself, had no easy task; what, in the temper of the
time, gives most cause for consideration, is the moderate spirit in
which they accomplished it.

[Footnote 11: _A Vindication of their Majesties' Authority to fill
the Sees of the Deprived Bishops_ (1691).]

III

The Nonjuring schism was by no means the only difficulty which the
Church of England had to confront in these troubled years. The
definition of her relationship with State and nation, if at the moment
it aroused less bitterness, was in the long run more intricate in its
nature. That some sort of toleration was inevitable few, save a group of
prejudiced irreconcilables, would have denied. But greater things were
in the air, and there were still many who dreamed of a grand scheme of
Comprehension, by which all save the more extreme Dissenters would have
been admitted to the Church. It is this which explains the acrimonious
debates of the next two years. The hatred of the Church for dissent can
only be understood by those who study with care the insults heaped upon
her by the sectaries during the Civil Wars. That men who had striven for
her dissolution should be admitted to her privileges seemed to Churchmen
as tragic as ironical. Nor must we miss the political aspect of the
matter. William had received an eager, if natural, support from
Nonconformists; and since the vast majority of them was Whig in temper,
the greater the degree of toleration, the greater likelihood there was
of an attack upon the Church. Exclusion thus became a fundamental
article of the Tory creed; and it was the more valued because it
enabled them to strike at their opponents through an institution which
at the trial of Sacheverell, in 1710, still showed an overwhelming hold
upon the mass of the people.

The attitude of mind herein implied is in large part the reaction from
the Erastian temper of the government. Under William, that temper is
intelligible