ngle body,
comprising men who had broken away from the Papacy but who had in other
respects no great objection to Roman Catholic forms and doctrines, and
also men seriously imbued with the strong Protestant feeling of Germany
and Switzerland; the strange ductility of belief and conduct that
induced the great majority of the English clergy to retain their
preferments and avoid persecution during the successive changes of Henry
VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, all assisted in forming a Church
of a very composite character. Two distinct theories found their place
within it. According to one school it was simply the pre-Reformation
Church purified from certain abuses that had gathered around it,
organically united with it through a divinely appointed episcopacy,
resting on an authoritative and ecclesiastical basis, and forming one of
the three great branches of the Catholic Church. According to the other
school it was one of several Protestant Churches, retaining indeed such
portions of the old ecclesiastical organisation as might be justified
from Scripture, but not regarding them as among the essentials of
Christianity; agreeing with other Protestant bodies in what was
fundamental, and differing from them mainly on points which were
non-essential; accepting cordially the principle that 'the Bible and
the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants,' and at the same time
separated by the gravest and most vital differences from what they
deemed the great apostasy of Rome.

It was argued on the one hand that in its ecclesiastical and legal
organisation the Church in England was identical with the Church in the
reign of Henry VII.; that there had been no breach of continuity; that
bishops, and often the same bishops, sat in the same sees before and
after the Reformation; that the great majority of the parochial clergy
were unchanged, holding their endowments by the same titles and tenures,
subject to the same courts, and meeting in Convocation in the same
manner as their predecessors; that the old Catholic services were merely
translated and revised, and that although Roman usurpations which had
never been completely acquiesced in had been decisively rejected, and
although many superstitious novelties had been removed, the Church of
England was still the Church of St. Augustine; that it had never, even
in the darkest period, lost its distinct existence, and that
supernatural graces and sacerdotal powers denied to all sc