s which were utterly contradictory to their private ones?
Many Nonjurors therefore, and many who had taken the oath on the
understanding that it only bound them to submission, absented themselves
entirely from public worship, or attended none other than nonjuring
services. There was a considerable party, headed unfortunately by
Bancroft himself, whose regret at the separation thus caused was greatly
tempered by a kind of exultation at being, as they maintained, the
'orthodox and Catholic remnant' from which the main body of the English
Church had apostatised.[107] Far different were the feelings of those
whose opinions on the subject were less strangely exaggerated. If they
joined the nonjuring communion, and forsook the familiar parish church,
they did so sadly and reluctantly, and looked forward in hope to some
change of circumstances which might remove their scruples and end the
schism. It was thoroughly distasteful to men like Ken, Nelson, and
Dodwell, to break away from a communion to which they were deeply
attached, and which they were quite persuaded was the purest and best in
Christendom. When the new Government was fairly established, when the
heat of feeling was somewhat cooled by time, when the High Church
sympathies of Anne had begun to reconcile them to the new succession,
and when the last of the ejected bishops had withdrawn all claim on
their obedience, many moderate Nonjurors were once more seen in church.
They agreed that the offence of the State prayers should be no longer an
insuperable bar.[108] They could at all events sufficiently signify
their objection to the obnoxious words by declining to say Amen, or by
rising from their knees, or by various other more or less demonstrative
signs of disapprobation. Some indeed of the Nonjurors, among whom Bishop
Frampton was prominent, and a great number of Jacobites, had never from
the first lent any countenance to the schism, and attended the Church
services as heretofore. The oath of allegiance being required before a
clergyman could take office, it is of course impossible to tell whether
any nonjuring clergyman would have consented to read, as well as to
listen to, the State prayers. But there was undoubtedly a large body of
Jacobite clergymen who in various ways reconciled this to their
conscience. Their argument, founded on the sort of provisional loyalty
due to a _de facto_ sovereignty, was a tolerably valid one in its kind;
a far more important one, in