To Sancroft, the Nonjurors, the ecclesiastical Tories of the period, and all men of that stamp who clung to the notion of the divine right of kings, may be applied the remark: “The great crises in the history of nations have often been met by a sort of feminine positiveness and a more obstinate reassertion of principles which have lost their hold upon a nation. The fixed ideas of a reactionary politician may be compared to madness. He grows more and more convinced of the truth of his notions as he becomes more isolated, and would rather await the inevitable than in any degree yield to circumstances.”[482] The Nonjuring movement took a narrow and troublesome political form, yet, notwithstanding all we have said, it was animated by an intensely religious spirit. This movement did not proceed from any principle founded upon reason, observation, or experience, but from a theological dogma about the divine right of kings, and the consequent duty, religious as it appeared to them, that subjects should unresistingly obey the Lord’s annointed. The scheme tended to the political enslavement of the country; it sapped the liberties of our constitution; yet it appears to have been an honest endeavour--prejudiced and ignorant, still an honest endeavour--to serve God: one of a multitude of instances in which false opinions have perverted true sentiments, and good motives have given sincerity and disinterestedness to bad actions. No philosophy of history, but one so wretchedly narrow as to forfeit all title to the name, will deny the co-existence of right and wrong in the same men, however hard it may be to untie the knot between them. [Sidenote: NONJURORS.] High Church theology of the Thorndike type had no adequate representative amongst the Nonjurors. They included no one of intellectual mark. Bull, the most distinguished scholar and the ablest divine of the old Anglican school, remained in the Establishment; so did all the chief theologians who leaned in the same direction with him. But High Church sentiment of the Laudean order, and such as belonged to Cosin and Seth Ward, drained off almost entirely into Nonjuring channels. The Nonjurors also went beyond their predecessors in this respect. They cast off all the Erastian trammels which were willingly worn by the Bishops of the Restoration.