the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like them it
discovered that connection with the State means, in the end, the
sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political situation. "The
State has deserted us," wrote Newman; and the words might have been
written of the earlier time. The Oxford movement, indeed, like its
predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and when Lord Brougham told
the House of Lords that the idea of the Church possessing "absolute and
unalienable rights" was a "gross and monstrous anomaly" because it would
make impossible the supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the
result of a doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first
completely defined by Wake and Hoadly. Nor has the history of this
controversy ended. "Thoughtful men," the Archbishop of Canterbury has
told the House of Lords,[14] "... see the absolute need, if a Church is
to be strong and vigorous, for the Church, _qua_ church, to be able to
say what it can do as a church." "The rule of the sovereign, the rule of
Parliament," replied Lord Haldane,[15] "extend as far as the rule of the
Church. They are not to be distinguished or differentiated, and that was
the condition under which ecclesiastical power was transmitted to the
Church of England." Today, that is to say, as in the past, antithetic
theories of the nature of the State hinge, in essence, upon the problem
of its sovereignty. "A free church in a free state," now, as then, may
be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to build it.

[Footnote 13: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chapter III.]

[Footnote 14: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34,
p. 992 (June 3, 1919).]

[Footnote 15: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p 1002.
The quotation does not fully represent Lord Haldane's views.]

CHAPTER IV

THE ERA OF STAGNATION

I

With the accession of George I, there ensued an era of unexampled calm
in English politics, which lasted until the expulsion of Walpole from
power in 1742. No vital questions were debated, nor did problems of
principle force themselves into view; and if the Jacobites remained in
the background as an element invincibly hostile to absorption, the
failure of their effort in 1715 showed how feeble was their hold on
English opinion. Not, indeed, that the new dynasty was popular. It had
nothing of that romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably
recorded in Scott's pages. The fi