in the afternoon.”[312] The Act of Settlement at length passed, and received the Royal assent. [Sidenote: THE SUCCESSION.] It is curious to observe with respect to this Act, that Sophia, who was made the protectress of the Reformed faith, and who was to supersede the Stuarts on the throne, was neither a zealous Protestant nor a foe to the exiled family. For when asked what was the religion of her blooming daughter, at the time just thirteen years of age, she replied she had none as yet; “we are waiting to know what prince she is to marry, and whenever that point is determined, she will be duly instructed in the religion of her future husband--whether Protestant or Catholic.” And in a communication, which Lord Chancellor Hardwicke called her Jacobite letter, she bewailed the fate of the poor Prince of Wales, who, if restored, she said, might be easily guided in a right direction.[313] [Sidenote: 1701.] A limitation of the heirship, within the pale of any particular Protestant community, which may become less and less national as time rolls on, is open to grave objections; but the limitation of descent within Protestant lines of some kind, appears to rest upon a sound basis. The reasons for it are furnished not by the religious, but by the political character of Romanism. No doctrinal or ecclesiastical opinions ought to exclude a legitimate heir, but a Popish claimant is the subject of another and an ambitious power, which associates temporal with spiritual authority, and exercises assumed prerogatives after an elastic fashion, which can contract or expand them with exquisite cunning, as fear darkens, or as hope brightens the prospect of futurity. A Roman Catholic Sovereign is involved in complications intolerable to a Protestant people, with a history full of warning against foreign interference. It was a true instinct which led Lord William Russell, amidst the aberrations of party zeal, to deprecate as a terrible calamity the accession of a Papist; the same instinct prompted the limitation of the Succession Act. Taught by the story of the past, our ancestors guarded against Romish intermeddling, and it is well for the fortunes of this country, that, acting on this maxim, our fathers did not, in a fit of blind generosity, mistaken for justice, open or keep open a door of mischief which, in some perilous hour, it might be impossible to shut. [Sidenote: JAMES II.]