conquered the serious initial difficulty of comprehending the Non-Juror’s position, was only too apt to consider him a fool for his pains.  ‘It has been the custom,’ wrote Mr. Lathbury, ’to speak of the Non-Jurors as a set of unreasonable men, and should I succeed in any measure in correcting those erroneous impressions, I shall feel that my labour has not been in vain.’  But in 1902, as Canon Overton is ready enough to perceive, ’their position is a little better understood.’  The well-nigh ‘fools’ are all but ‘confessors.’

 [Footnote A:  A History of the Non-Jurors.  By Thomas Lathbury. 
 London:  Pickering, 1845.]

 [Footnote B:  The Non-Jurors.  By J.H.  Overton, D.D.  London:  Smith,
 Elder and Co., 1902, 16s.]

The early history of the Non-Jurors is as fascinating and as fruitful as their later history is dull, melancholy, and disappointing.

Nobody will deny that the Bishops, clergy, and laity of the Church of England who refused to take the oaths to William and Mary and George I., when tendered to them, were amply justified in the Court of Conscience.  They were ridiculed by the politicians of the day for their supersensitiveness; but what were they to do?  If they took the oaths, they apostalized from the faith they had once professed.

Before the Revolution it was the faith of all High Churchmen—­part of the deposition they had to guard—­that the doctrine of non-resistance and passive obedience was Gospel truth, primitive doctrine, and a chief ‘characteristic’ of the Anglican Church.

The saintly John Kettlewell, in his tractate, Christianity:  a Doctrine of the Cross, or Passive Obedience under any Pretended Invasion of Legal Rights and Liberties (1696), makes this perfectly plain; and when Ken came to compose his famous will, wherein he declared that he died in the Communion of the Church of England, ’as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross,’ the good Bishop did not mean what many a pious soul in later days has been edified by thinking he did mean, the doctrine of the Atonement, but that of passive obedience, which was the Non-Juror’s cross.

It is sad to think a doctrine dear to so many saintly men, maintained with an erudition so vast and exemplified by sacrifices so great, should have disappeared in the vortex of present-day conflict.  It may some day reappear in Convocation.  Kettlewell, who was a precise writer and accurate thinker, defined sovereignty as supremacy.  ‘Kings,’ he said, ’can be no longer sovereigns, but subjects, if they have any superiors’; and he points out with much acumen that the best security under a sovereign ‘which sovereignty allows’ is that the Kings and Ministers are accountable and liable for breach of law as well as others.  Kettlewell, had he lived long enough, might have come to transfer his idea of sovereignty to Kings, Lords, and Commons speaking through an Act of Parliament, and if so, he would have urged active