Church that
the charge of subjection to the State should rouse a deep and quick
resentment. She cannot be a church unless she is a _societas perfecta_;
she cannot have within herself the elements of perfect fellowship if
what seem the plain commands of Christ are to be at the mercy of the
king in Parliament. That is the difficulty which lies at the bottom of
the debate with Wake in one age and with Hoadly in the next. In some
sort, it is the problem of sovereignty that is here at issue; and it is
in this sense that the problems of the Revolution are linked with the
Oxford Movement. But Newman and his followers are the unconscious
sponsors of a debate which grows in volume; and to discuss the thoughts
of Wake and Hoadly and Law is thus, in a vital aspect, the study of
contemporary ideas.

We are not here concerned with the wisdom of those of William's advisers
who exacted an oath of allegiance from the clergy. It raised in acute
form the validity of a doctrine which had, for more than a century, been
the main foundation of the alliance between throne and altar in England.
The demand precipitated a schism which lingered on, though fitfully,
until the threshold of the nineteenth century. The men who could not
take the oath were, many of them, among the most distinguished churchmen
of the time. Great ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of
Canterbury and one of the seven who had gained immortality by his
resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of Bath and Wells,
scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men like Charles Leslie,
born with a genius for recrimination; much, it is clear, of what was
best in the Church of England was to be found amongst them. There is not
a little of beauty, and much of pathos in their history. Most, after
their deprivation, were condemned to poverty; few of them recanted. The
lives of men like Sancroft and Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are
part of the great Anglican tradition of earnest simplicity which later
John Keble was to illustrate for the nineteenth century. The Nonjurors,
as they were called, were not free from bitterness; and the history of
their effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph
Taylor, to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one. Not, indeed, that
the history even of their decline is without its interest; and the
study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the
Eastern Church, must always possess a singular in