hismatics had
descended to it through the Episcopacy in an unbroken stream. On the
other hand it was argued that the essential of a true Church lay in the
accordance of its doctrines with the language of Scripture and not in
the methods of Church government, and that whatever might be the case in
a legal point of view, the theory of the unity of the Church before and
after the Reformation was in a theological sense a delusion. The Church
under Henry VII. was emphatically a theocracy or ecclesiastical
monarchy, the Pope, as the supposed successor of the supposed prince of
the Apostles, being the very keystone of the spiritual arch. Under Henry
VIII. and Elizabeth the Church of England had become a kind of
aristocracy of bishops, governed very really as well as theoretically by
the Crown, totally cut off from what called itself the Chair of Peter,
and placed under completely new relations with the Catholic Church of
Christendom. In this space of time Anglican Christianity had discarded
not only the Papacy but also great part of what for centuries before the
change had been deemed vitally and incontestably necessary both in its
theology and in its devotions. Though much of the old organisation and
many of the old formularies had been retained, its articles, its
homilies, the constant teaching of its founders, breathed a spirit of
unquestionable Protestantism. The Church which remained attached to
Rome, and which held the same doctrines, practised the same devotions,
and performed the same ceremonies as the English Church under Henry
VII., professed to be infallible, and it utterly repudiated all
connection with the new Church of England, and regarded it as nothing
more than a Protestant schism; while the Church of England in her
authorised formularies branded some of the central beliefs and devotions
of the Roman Church as blasphemous, idolatrous, superstitious and
deceitful, and was long accustomed to regard that Church as the Church
of Antichrist; the Harlot of the Apocalypse, drunk with the blood of the
Saints. Each Church during long periods and to the full measure of its
powers suppressed or persecuted the other.

In the eyes of the Erastian and also in the eyes of the Puritan the
theory of the spiritual unity of these two bodies, and the various
sacerdotal consequences that were inferred from it, seemed incredible,
nor did the first generation of our reformers shrink from communion,
sympathy and co-operation with the