really very scrupulous, and through religious animosity supposed to be still less so, had been induced by the undoubted prospect of advantage to draw the king, who had been wholly their slave, into one of those frauds which bigotry might call pious.[140] _Justice and necessity of the Revolution._--The great event however of what has been emphatically denominated in the language of our public acts the Glorious Revolution stands in need of no vulgar credulity, no mistaken prejudice, for its support. It can only rest on the basis of a liberal theory of government, which looks to the public good as the great end for which positive laws and the constitutional order of states have been instituted. It cannot be defended without rejecting the slavish principles of absolute obedience, or even that pretended modification of them which imagines some extreme cases of intolerable tyranny, some, as it were, lunacy of despotism, as the only plea and palliation of resistance. Doubtless the administration of James II. was not of this nature. Doubtless he was not a Caligula, or a Commodus, or an Ezzelin, or a Galeazzo Sforza, or a Christiern II. of Denmark, or a Charles IX. of France, or one of those almost innumerable tyrants whom men have endured in the wantonness of unlimited power. No man had been deprived of his liberty by any illegal warrant. No man, except in the single though very important instance of Magdalen College, had been despoiled of his property. I must also add that the government of James II. will lose little by comparison with that of his father. The judgment in favour of his prerogative to dispense with the test, was far more according to received notions of law, far less injurious and unconstitutional, than that which gave a sanction to ship-money. The injunction to read the declaration of indulgence in churches was less offensive to scrupulous men than the similar command to read the declaration of Sunday sports in the time of Charles I. Nor was any one punished for a refusal to comply with the one; while the prisons had been filled with those who had disobeyed the other. Nay, what is more, there are much stronger presumptions of the father's than of the son's intention to lay aside parliaments, and set up an avowed despotism. It is indeed amusing to observe that many, who scarcely put bounds to their eulogies of Charles I., have been content to abandon the cause of one who had no faults in his public conduct but such as seemed to have come by inheritance. The characters of the father and son were very closely similar: both proud of their judgment as well as their station, and still more obstinate in their understanding than in their purpose; both scrupulously conscientious in certain great points of conduct, to the sacrifice of that power which they had preferred to everything else; the one far superior in relish for the arts and for polite letters, the other more diligent and indefatigable in business; the