nonjurors. His authority and example had induced some of his
brethren, who had at first wavered, to resign their benefices.
The day of suspension came; the day of deprivation came; and
still he was firm. He seemed to have found, in the consciousness
of rectitude, and in meditation on the invisible world, ample
compensation for all his losses. While excluded from the pulpit
where his eloquence had once delighted the learned and polite
inmates of the Temple, he wrote that celebrated Treatise on Death
which, during many years, stood next to the Whole Duty of Man in
the bookcases of serious Arminians. Soon, however, it began to be
suspected that his resolution was giving way. He declared that he
would be no party to a schism; he advised those who sought his
counsel not to leave their parish churches; nay, finding that the
law which had ejected him from his cure did not interdict him
from performing divine service, he officiated at Saint Dunstan's,
and there prayed for King William and Queen Mary. The apostolical
injunction, he said, was that prayers should be made for all in
authority, and William and Mary were visibly in authority. His
Jacobite friends loudly blamed his inconsistency. How, they
asked, if you admit that the Apostle speaks in this passage of
actual authority, can you maintain that, in other passages of a
similar kind, he speaks only of legitimate authority? Or how can
you, without sin, designate as King, in a solemn address to God,
one whom you cannot, without sin, promise to obey as King? These
reasonings were unanswerable; and Sherlock soon began to think
them so; but the conclusion to which they led him was
diametrically opposed to the conclusion to which they were meant
to lead him. He hesitated, however, till a new light flashed on
his mind from a quarter from which there was little reason to
expect any thing but tenfold darkness. In the reign of James the