It was proposed to enact that every person who held any office, civil, military, or spiritual, should, on pain of deprivation, solemnly abjure the exiled King; that the oath of abjuration might be tendered by any justice of the peace to any subject of their Majesties; and that, if it were refused, the recusant should be sent to prison, and should lie there as long as he continued obstinate.
The severity of this last provision was generally and most justly blamed.

To turn every ignorant meddling magistrate into a state inquisitor, to insist that a plain man, who lived peaceably, who obeyed the laws, who paid his taxes, who had never held and who did not expect ever to hold any office, and who had never troubled his head about problems of political philosophy, should declare, under the sanction of an oath, a decided opinion on a point about which the most learned Doctors of the age had written whole libraries of controversial books, and to send him to rot in a gaol if he could not bring himself to swear, would surely have been the height of tyranny.

The clause which required public functionaries to abjure the deposed King was not open to the same objections.

Yet even against this clause some weighty arguments were urged.

A man, it was said, who has an honest heart and a sound understanding is sufficiently bound by the present oath.