"Resistance is nowhere enacted to be legal, but subjected, by all the laws now in being, to the greatest penalties. 'Tis what is not, cannot, nor ought ever to be described, or affirmed in any positive law, to be excusable; when, and upon what _never-to-be-expected_ occasions, it may be exercised, no man can foresee; _and ought never to be thought of, but when an utter subversion of the laws of the realm threatens the whole frame of a Constitution, and no redress can otherwise be hoped for_. It therefore does and _ought forever_ to stand, in the eye and letter of the law, as the _highest offence_. But because any man, or party of men, may not, out of folly or wantonness, commit treason, or make their own discontents, ill principles, or disguised affections to another interest, a pretence to resist the supreme power, will it follow from thence that the _utmost necessity_ ought not to engage a nation _in its own defence for the preservation of the whole_?" * * * * * Sir Joseph Jekyl was, as I have always heard and believed, as nearly as any individual could be, the very standard of Whig principles in his age. He was a learned and an able man; full of honor, integrity, and public spirit; no lover of innovation; nor disposed to change his solid principles for the giddy fashion of the hour. Let us hear this Whig. * * * * * _Sir Joseph Jekyl._ [Sidenote: Commons do not state the limits of submission.] [Sidenote: To secure the laws, the only aim of the Revolution.] "In clearing up and vindicating the justice of the Revolution, which was the second thing proposed, it is far from the intent of the Commons to state the _limits and bounds_ of the subject's submission to the sovereign. That which the law hath been wisely silent in, the Commons desire to be silent in too; nor will they put _any_ case of a justifiable resistance, but that of the Revolution only: and _they persuade themselves that the doing right to that resistance will be so far from promoting popular license or confusion, that it will have a contrary effect, and be a means of settling men's minds in the love of and veneration for the laws_; to rescue and secure which was the _ONLY aim and intention of those concerned in that resistance_." * * * * * Dr. Sacheverell's counsel defended him on this principle, namely,--that, whilst he enforced from the pulpit the general doctrine of non-resistance, he was not obliged to take notice of the theoretic limits which ought to modify that doctrine. Sir Joseph Jekyl, in his reply, whilst he controverts its application to the Doctor's defence, fully admits and even enforces the principle itself, and supports the Revolution of 1688, as he and all the managers had done before, exactly upon the same grounds on which Mr. Burke has built, in his Reflections on the French Revolution. * * * * * _Sir Joseph Jekyl._