Sancroft, soon after the Revolution, published what was called _Bishop Overall’s Convocation Book_, written in the reign of James I., containing certain conclusions respecting Ecclesiastical and Civil Government, one of which, notwithstanding the current tone of the book in favour of non-resistance, is to the effect, that a Government originating in rebellion, when thoroughly settled, should be reverenced and obeyed as “being always God’s authority, and therefore receiving no impeachment by the wickedness of those that have it.” The Convocations of Canterbury and York had endorsed the contents of Overall’s volume; and, by a canon, distinctly condemned the doctrine that a Government begun by rebellion, after being thoroughly settled, is not of God.[194] Sherlock made a good deal out of this, and said he should have continued to stick at the oaths, had he not been relieved by Overall’s book, and had not the venerable authority of a Convocation given him a freedom of thinking, which the apprehensions of novelty and singularity had cramped before.[195] He did not consider, as is sometimes represented, that the Bishop and Convocation settled the matter, and that he was to submit as a child to the authoritative decree; but that a door had been thereby opened to the sons of the Church to look at the matter;[196] and that he, having been thus induced to examine it afresh, had for various reasons, which he assigns--some of which, it must be acknowledged, run counter to his previous publications on the subject[197]--arrived at the conclusion that he could conscientiously take the required vow. A terrible storm assailed him after this. Argument, satire, and abuse, sometimes in vulgar prose, sometimes in doggerel rhyme, descended in torrents upon his devoted head. Nonjurors reviled him on the one side; Revolutionists on the other; and people who did not care for either side joined in the old English cry against turncoats and time-servers. Most people maintained he had changed for the sake of loaves and fishes; and, as Mrs. Sherlock had made herself very notorious, and was said to have had immense influence over her husband, she caught a terrible pelting from a literary mob, who assailed her as Xanthippe, Delilah, and Eve, all in one. Sherlock had to pay the penalty, which men, whose new opinions jump in the same direction as their pecuniary interests, must ever pay; but human motives, whether good or evil, lie so far beneath the surface, that the reading of them by even honest historians may widely differ from the reading of them by the only Omniscient One. Contemporaries were too much involved in party strife to take an unbiassed view of Sherlock’s conduct; and writers since have scarcely been able to free themselves from prejudices handed down by the pamphlets of that day. The grave feature of the case affecting the reputation of the Master and Dean, is to be found, not in the new application of a principle which he