A mania for oath-taking infected our fathers, and now, in addition to the old law, which had occasioned the nonjuring party, came a new law, which served to revive it. When death had taken away the Sovereign to whom they regarded themselves as pledged while he lived, the Nonjurors began to deliberate about taking the oath, but a new form of abjuration stopped their deliberations.[322] Ken was troubled at the prospect of its universal imposition, and hoped its enforcement would be limited; but a Bill passed requiring not only all civil officers, but also all ecclesiastics, all members of the Universities, and all schoolmasters to acknowledge William as _lawful and rightful_ King, and to deny any title whatever in the pretended Prince of Wales. Sixteen Lords, including Compton, Bishop of London, and Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, protested against the Abjuration Bill;[323] and others reasonably judged that to swear allegiance was one thing, but to swear respecting the nature of a title to the Crown was another--that in the first case people were within the region of fact, that in the second they were brought into the region of theory. Calamy records, with no apparent dissatisfaction, that the oath was thought to be the best means of disappointing such as hoped by the assistance of France to make way for the Pretender, and so accomplish the design of restoring arbitrary power and the Popish religion.[324] The Abjuration Bill received the Royal assent by Commission in the month of March, 1702. Naturally at this juncture there were Jacobites who felt a flutter of excitement. Looking upon oaths as cobwebs easily brushed away, they hoped the Hanoverian succession might prove an idle dream, and, on the tiptoe of expectation, began eagerly to talk to one another of prospects, which brightened as the declining health of William foreboded his speedy removal. One busy agent forwarded for the use of the Stuarts certain proposals, in which he curiously sketched the political views of religious parties in this country, as they struck his eye. [Sidenote: STATE OF PARTIES.]