It is by no means evident that the decision in this particular case of Hales, which had the approbation of eleven judges out of twelve, was against law.[98] The course of former precedents seems rather to furnish its justification. But the less untenable such a judgment in favour of the dispensing power might appear, the more necessity would men of reflection perceive of making some great change in the relations of the people towards their sovereign. A prerogative of setting aside the enactments of parliament, which in trifling matters, and for the sake of conferring a benefit on individuals, might be suffered to exist with little mischief, became intolerable when exercised in contravention of the very principle of those statutes which had been provided for the security of fundamental liberties or institutions. Thus the test act, the great achievement, as it had been reckoned, of the protestant party, for the sake of which the most subservient of parliaments had just then ventured to lose the king's favour, became absolutely nugatory and ineffective, by a construction which the law itself did not reject. Nor was it easy to provide any sufficient remedy by means of parliament; since it was the doctrine of the judges, that the king's inseparable and sovereign prerogatives in matters of government could not be taken away or restrained by statute. The unadvised assertion in a court of justice of this principle, which though not by any means novel, had never been advanced in a business of such universal concern and interest, may be said to have sealed the condemnation of the house of Stuart. It made the co-existence of an hereditary line, claiming a sovereign prerogative paramount to the liberties they had vouchsafed to concede, incompatible with the security or probable duration of those liberties. This incompatibility is the true basis of the revolution in 1688.