Bishop Lake of Chichester said on his death-bed that ’he looked upon the great doctrine of passive obedience as the distinguishing character of the Church of England,’[96] and that it was a doctrine for which he hoped he could lay down his life.  Bishop Thomas of Worcester, who died the same year, expressed the same belief and the same hope.  Robert Nelson spoke of it as the good and wholesome doctrine of the Church of England, ’wherein she has gloried as her special characteristic....  Papists and Presbyterians have both been tardy on these points, and I wish the practice of some in the Church of England had been more blameless,’[97] but he was sure that it had been the doctrine of the primitive Christians, and that it was very plainly avowed both by the Church and State of England.  Sancroft vehemently reproved ’the apostacy of the National Church’[98] in departing from this point of faith.  Even Tillotson and Burnet[99] were at one time no less decided about it.  The former urged it upon Lord Russell as ’the declared doctrine of all Protestant Churches,’ and that the contrary was ‘a very great and dangerous mistake,’ and that if not a sin of ignorance, ’it will appear of a much more heinous nature, as in truth it is, and calls for a very particular and deep repentance.’[100] Just about the time when the new oath of allegiance was imposed, the doctrine of non-resistance received the very aid it most needed, in the invention of a new term admirably adapted to inspire a warmer feeling of religious enthusiasm in those who were preparing to suffer in its cause.  The expression appears to have originated with Kettlewell, who had strongly felt the force of an objection which had been raised to Bishop Lake’s declaration.  It had been said that to call this or that doctrine the distinguishing characteristic of a particular Church was so far forth to separate it from the Church Catholic.  Kettlewell saw at once that this argument wounded High Churchmen in the very point where they were most sensitive, and for the future preferred to speak of non-resistance as characteristically ’a Doctrine of the Cross.’[101] The epithet was quickly adopted, and no doubt was frequently a source of consolation to Nonjurors.  At other times it might have conveyed a painful sense of disproportion in its application to what, from another point of view, was a mere political revolution.  But with them passive obedience and divine right had been raised to the level of a great religious principle for which they were well content to be confessors.  It must have added much to the moral strength of the nonjuring separation.  Argument or ridicule would not make much impression upon men who had always this to fall back upon, that ’non-resistance is after all too much a doctrine of the Cross, not to meet with great opposition from the prejudices and passions of men.  Flesh and blood and corrupt reason will set up the great law of self-preservation against it, and find a thousand absurdities and contradictions