still should be considered as virtually correct.[158] But its distinct assertion in the bill of rights put a most essential restraint on the monarchy, and rendered it in effect for ever impossible to employ any direct force or intimidation against the established laws and liberties of the people. _Discontent with the new government._--A revolution so thoroughly remedial, and accomplished with so little cost of private suffering, so little of angry punishment or oppression of the vanquished, ought to have been hailed with unbounded thankfulness and satisfaction. The nation's deliverer and chosen sovereign, in himself the most magnanimous and heroic character of that age, might have expected no return but admiration and gratitude. Yet this was very far from being the case. In no period of time under the Stuarts were public discontent and opposition of parliament more prominent than in the reign of William III.; and that high-souled prince enjoyed far less of his subject's affection than Charles II. No part of our history perhaps is read upon the whole with less satisfaction than these thirteen years, during which he sat upon his elective throne. It will be sufficient for me to sketch generally the leading causes, and the errors both of the prince and people, which hindered the blessings of the revolution from being duly appreciated by its contemporaries. The votes of the two houses, that James had abdicated, or in plainer words forfeited, his royal authority, that the crown was vacant, that one out of the regular line of succession should be raised to it, were so untenable by any known law, so repugnant to the principles of the established church, that a nation accustomed to think upon matters of government only as lawyers and churchmen dictated, could not easily reconcile them to its preconceived notions of duty. The first burst of resentment against the late king was mitigated by his fall; compassion, and even confidence, began to take place of it; his adherents--some denying or extenuating the faults of his administration, others more artfully representing them as capable of redress by legal measures--having recovered from their consternation, took advantage of the necessary delay before the meeting of the convention, and of the time consumed in its debates, to publish pamphlets and circulate rumours in his behalf.[159] Thus, at the moment when William and Mary were proclaimed (though it may be probable that a majority of the kingdom sustained the bold votes of its representatives), there was yet a very powerful minority who believed the constitution to be most violently shaken, if not irretrievably destroyed, and the rightful sovereign to have been excluded by usurpation. The clergy were moved by pride and shame, by the just apprehension that their influence over the people would be impaired, by jealousy or hatred of the nonconformists, to deprecate so practical a confutation of the doctrines they had preached, especially