terest for students of
ecclesiastical history.

Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than
religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past. At the
bottom it is the obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they
represent. That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular
state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the
allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had
declared of vital import to his very existence. Its main opponents,
moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men like Andrewes must
have felt that when they answered Bellarmine they were in substance also
defenders of their Church. After the great controversy of James I's
reign resistance as a duty had come to be regarded as a main element in
Jesuit and Nonconformist teaching; with the result that its antithesis
became, as a consequence of the political situation, no less integral a
part of Church of England doctrine. For it was upon the monarchy that
the Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to
the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made it, the
main weapon of the dissenting churches there was little hope that it
would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown. And it is
this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like Barrow
and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper. When they urge
the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in truth the sovereignty
of the Church; and that means the triumph of men who looked with
contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of every sect. The Church of
England taught non-resistance as the condition of its own survival.

How deep-rooted this doctrine had become in the course of the
seventeenth century the writings of men like Mainwaring and Sanderson
sufficiently show; yet nothing so completely demonstrates its widespread
acceptance as the result of the Revolution. Four hundred clergy
abandoned their preferment because James ruled by Divine Right; and they
could not in conscience resist even his iniquities. An able tract of
1689[10] had collected much material to show how integral the doctrine
was to the beliefs of the Church. Had William's government, indeed,
refrained from the imposition of the oath, it is possible that there
might have been no schism at all; for the early Nonjurors at
least--perhaps Hickes and Turner are except