That Convocation of 1689 saved the Church of England from dissolution into a formless, gelatinous, and invertebrate mass.
Burnet himself, though disappointed at the time, felt afterwards that the determination of the Lower House had saved the Church at a time of crisis. "There was," he says, "a very happy direction of the providence of God observed in this matter. The Jacobite clergy who were then under suspension were designing to make a schism in the Church, whensoever they should be turned out and their places should be filled up by others. They saw it would not be easy to make a separation upon a private and personal account; they therefore wished to be furnished with more specious pretences, and if we had made alterations in the Rubrics and other parts of the Common Prayer, they would have pretended that they still stuck to the ancient Church of England, in opposition to those who were altering it and setting up new models. And, as I do firmly believe that there is a wise providence that watches upon human affairs, and directs them—so I have observed this in many instances relating to the Revolution ... by all the judgments we could afterwards make, if we had carried a majority in the Convocation for alterations, they would have done us more hurt than good."
Burnet was morally and intellectually incapable of seeing that it was a case of conscience, of stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ, and he attributed the motives of the recalcitrant clergy to political prejudice.
On Jane's return to Oxford, he found another opportunity of defending the Church, by framing the decree of 1690, which condemned the "Naked Gospel" of Arthur Burge.
Jane had no hopes whatever of preferment from William, if he cared for it. In 1696 it was even rumoured that the King meditated turning him out of his professorship, because he had not signed the "Association for King William." But on Anne's accession, all his fears were at an end. It would appear from a letter of Atterbury that at Oxford the University desired to get rid of him, because he neglected giving lectures on Divinity, and left the work to be discharged by a subordinate named Smallridge.
In 1703 Bishop Trelawny appointed him to the Chancellorship of Exeter Cathedral, which he exchanged for the precentorship in 1704, but he retained his Regius professorship to the end. Undoubtedly it was a great pleasure to him in the decline of his life to be back in the West Country.
He resigned the precentorship of Exeter in 1706, and died on the 23rd February, 1707, at Oxford, and was buried in Christ Church.
The writer of his life in the Dictionary of National Biography sums up his career with these words: "Jane was a clerical politician of a low type; Calamy says of him, 'Though fond of the rites and ceremonies of the Church, he was a Calvinist in the respect of doctrine,' and the pleasantest thing recorded of him is his kindness shown at Oxford to the ejected Presbyterian, Thomas Gilbert."
Calamy, as a Dissenter, was prejudiced against Jane; and I do not see that he was of a low type of polemical cleric—because when he saw that the theory of government he had embraced would not bear the test of experience, he had the courage to reject it. Every man is liable to make mistakes; it is only the brave man who can acknowledge that he has been mistaken.