The Act was submitted to the Estates, and became law on the 7th of June 1690. It declared Presbytery to be “the only government of Christ’s Church within this kingdom”; it condoned the action of the peasantry in expelling the Episcopal clergy by force; and it placed the government of the Church in the hands of the sixty ministers who had been replaced in the livings from which they had been ejected at the Restoration. Yet the Government acted on tolerant principles. All Episcopal clergymen who took the oaths were left in peaceable possession of their churches, without being called on to submit to the Presbyterian Church courts; and some even of those who refused to take the oaths, and who prayed publicly for the late king and his family, continued to enjoy their livings without molestation.[107] After a few years, when it was seen that the Jacobites were quite irreconcilable, an Act was passed which provided that no one could hold a benefice without taking the oath of allegiance, signing the assurance, which was a declaration that William and Mary were the only lawful sovereigns of the realm, signing the Westminster Confession of Faith, and submitting to the Presbyterian system of Church government. Yet so lenient was the spirit of the Whigs that, instead of vigorously enforcing this law, they superseded it, to a great extent, by another and milder Act, under which taking the oaths to Government became the only qualification required from any Episcopal preacher in Scotland. At the Revolution, and in consequence of the position in which the Episcopal clergy found themselves, it became the fixed policy of the Jacobites to call the attention of Englishmen to what was going on in the North; and during the reign of William there issued from the press a series of pamphlets, the purpose of which was to create a feeling against the Presbyterians so strong that, if a favourable opportunity should occur, the Scottish Establishment might be attacked and overthrown. The first to take the field were “two persons of quality.” Sir George Mackenzie, the late Lord Advocate, and Lord Tarbat, afterwards the first Earl of Cromartie, went to London at the crisis of the Revolution, and published a pamphlet, the purpose of which was to persuade the Prince of Orange that the principles of the Presbyterians were not only inconsistent with monarchy, but even destructive of all human society.[108] This production did not attract much notice; but a great effect was produced by a more elaborate piece of work, to which Mackenzie devoted the last months of his life. This was a vindication of the system of government pursued in Scotland during the reign of Charles the Second.[109] It was, in a measure, a vindication of his own life, for few of the rulers of Scotland had taken a more important part in the questionable transactions of that reign. When his public career was ended by the Revolution, he had retired to Oxford, where Whigs and