The Nonjurors fixed their head-quarters in the Metropolis. There Kettlewell settled after leaving his incumbency. With all his ardour and decision he did not practically go so far as some of his brethren. He objected to the clergy attending parish churches, because, as he said, if only two or three joined them in private, they might canonically minister, and have Christ in the midst of them; but he did not object to the laity uniting in worship with clergymen who took the oaths. Upon examining the ground of this concession, however, we find it rests on the idea that the ministration of the ordained is essential to the Divine acceptance of social service, and the public devotion in which he allowed the laity to participate only consisted of common prayer on ordinary occasions, not of special prayer connected with national festivals.[458] He would in no way sanction the use of intercession for William and Mary, and was himself very particular in praying not only for King James, but in obeying the order issued before the Revolution, for supplications on behalf of the Prince of Wales. He reached, by a confused logical process, the high ecclesiastical ground, “that the determination of the Church of England, so solemnly given in her prayers, was on his side, and was so binding as it could not be reversed by a superior authority, or even reversed at all, without making the public voice of this Church to contradict itself.”[459] He pushed his views of the individual responsibility of clergymen--and, if I understand him aright, of laymen as well--to such an extent that he reached a position of thorough independency, for he says, true and faithful pastors are not so strictly bound to keep up external unity and peace, as to maintain truth and righteousness and the unpolluted worship of the Church; and that however private persons are bound to use modesty and caution in following the “venerable ecclesiastical judicatories on earth, yet it is not any _implicit dependence_ on men, or a _blind obedience_ to any human sentence or decision whatsoever, but observance of the truth itself, and of what God hath in His Word decided, that must justify them in determining themselves whom they are to follow.”[460] This is the very protestantism of the Protestant Religion, the very dissidence of dissent, and it affords an example of the inconsistency which comes in the wake of circumstances, and of the odd way in which extremes meet. Kettlewell, in fact, had become a Nonconformist, and he justified himself only by arguments of the same description as those which other Nonconformists employ. From the same cause he was led to declare, there might be ground for breaking off from any Church without incurring schism, “there being some things not to be borne with, nor others to be parted with, for the sake of an external union;”[461] so far he made common cause with John Robinson and John Owen. [Sidenote: 1694–1702.]