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Updated: June 8, 2025
They could not take the oath, but neither did they make it any cause of severance, or discontinue their attendance at the public prayers. But for the most part even those Nonjurors who held no extreme views fell gradually into a set of their own, with its own ideas, hopes, prejudices, and sympathies.
But all his deeper sympathies were with the High Churchmen and Nonjurors men who had been brought up in that spirit of profound attachment to Anglo-Catholic theology and feeling which was prominent among Church of England divines in the age that preceded the Commonwealth.
If the Nonjurors were nearly allied with the Jacobites on the one side, they were also the main supporters of religious opinions which were in no way related with one dynasty of sovereigns rather than with another, but which have always formed a very important element of English Church history, and could not pass for the time into comparative oblivion without a corresponding loss.
No name was in 1689 cited by the Jacobites so proudly and fondly as that of Sherlock. Before the end of 1690 that name excited very different feelings. A few other nonjurors ought to be particularly noticed. High among them in rank was George Hickes, Dean of Worcester.
Nottingham was a diligent and honest minister; but he was as high a Tory as a faithful subject of William and Mary could be; he loved and esteemed many of the nonjurors; and, though he might force himself to be severe when nothing but severity could save the State, he was not extreme to mark the transgressions of his old friends; nor did he encourage talebearers to come to Whitehall with reports of conspiracies.
True, if they be rendered clandestine, as the persecutors would make them; but if these temples be open and free, the eye of the law will penetrate there and every where else: it will be no longer religious worship, it will be crime they will watch and detect and what do you fear? Time is with you; this class of the nonjurors will be extinct, and never renewed.
Some indeed of the Nonjurors, among whom Bishop Frampton was prominent, and a great number of Jacobites, had never from the first lent any countenance to the schism, and attended the Church services as heretofore.
Among the Nonjurors Henry Dodwell, for example, was a real power, as a man of holy life and profound learning, whose views, although carried to an extreme in which few could altogether concur, were still in general principle, and when stated in more moderate terms, those of the great majority of the whole body.
All this the Nonjurors would have admitted, and the mere fact that it could be used as argument against them is proof that they were out of touch with the national temper. What they wanted was a legal revolution which is in the nature of things impossible. We may regret that the oath was deemed essential, and feel that it might not have been so stoutly pressed.
There is but one set of writers whose minds are exactly represented by Mr. Newman and his friends, and these are the nonjurors.
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