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