The argument has a wider history than its controversial statement might seem to warrant.  At bottom, clearly enough, it is an attack upon the new tradition which Locke had brought into being.  What seems to impress it most is the impossibility of founding society upon other than a divine origin.  Anything less will not command the assent of men sufficiently to be immune from their evil passions.  Let their minds but once turn to resistance, and the bonds of social order will be broken.  Complete submission is the only safeguard against anarchy.  So, a century later, de Maistre could argue that unless the whole world became the subject of Rome, the complete dissolution of Christian society must follow.  So, too, fifty years before, Hobbes had argued for an absolute dominion lest the ambitions and desires of men break through the fragile boundaries of the social estate.

The answer is clear enough; and, indeed, the case against the Nonjurors is nowhere so strong as on its political side.  Men cannot be confined within the limits of so narrow a logic.  They will not, with Bishop Ken, rejoice in suffering as a doctrine of the Cross.  Rather will oppression in its turn arouse a sense of wrong and that be parent of a conscience which provokes to action.  Here was the root of Locke’s doctrine of consent; for unless the government, as Hume was later to point out, has on its side the opinion of men, it cannot hope to endure.  The fall of James was caused, not as the Nonjurors were tempted to think, by popular disregard of Divine personality, but by his own misunderstanding of the limits to which misgovernment may go.  Here their opponents had a strong case to present; for, as Stillingfleet remarked, if William had not come over there might have been no Church of England for the Nonjurors to preserve.  And other ingenious compromises were suggested.  Non-resistance, it was argued by Sherlock, applied to government in general; and the oath, as a passage in the Convocation Book of Overall seemed to suggest, might be taken not less to a de facto monarch than to one de jure.  Few, indeed would have taken the ground of Bishop Burnet, and allotted the throne to William and Mary as conquerors of the Kingdom; at least the pamphlet in which this uncomfortable doctrine was put forward the House of Commons had burned by the common hangman.

What really defeated the Nonjurors’ claims was commonsense.  Much the ablest attack upon their position was Stillingfleet’s defence of the policy employed in filling up the sees vacated by deprivation; and it is remarkable that the theory he employs is to insist that unless the lawfulness of what had been done is admitted, the Nonjuror’s position is inevitable.  “If it be unlawful to succeed a deprived bishop,” he wrote,[11] “then he is the bishop of the diocese still:  and then the law that deprives him is no law, and consequently the king and Parliament that made that law no king and Parliament:  and how can this be reconciled