non-episcopal Protestants of the
Continent. Although they laid great stress on patristic authority, and
consented--chiefly through political motives--to leave in the
Prayer-book many things derived from the older Church, yet the High
Church theory of Anglicanism is much more the product of the
seventeenth-century divines than of the reformers, just as Roman
Catholicism is much more akin to the later fathers than to primitive
Christianity. No one could doubt on what side were the sympathies and
what were the opinions of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Jewell and Hooper,
and what spirit pervades the articles and the homilies. A Church which
does not claim to be infallible; which owes its special form chiefly to
the sagacity of statesmen; in which the supreme tribunal, deciding what
doctrines may be taught by the clergy, is a secular law court; in which
the bands of conformity are so loose that the tendencies and sentiments
of the nation give the complexion to the Church, appears in the eyes of
men of these schools to have no possible right to claim or share the
authority of the Church of Rome. It rests on another basis. It must be
justified on other grounds.

These two distinct schools, however, have subsisted in the Church. Each
of them can find some support in the Prayer-book, and the old orthodox
High Church school which was chiefly elaborated and which chiefly
flourished under the Stuarts, has produced a great part of the most
learned theology of Christendom, and had in its early days little or no
tendency to Rome. It was exclusive and repellent on the side of
Nonconformity, and it placed Church authority very high; but the immense
majority of its members were intensely loyal to the Anglican Church, and
lived and died contentedly within its pale. There were, however, always
in that Church men of another kind whose true ideal lay beyond its
border. Falkland, in a remarkable speech, delivered in 1640, speaks of
them with much bitterness. 'Some,' he says, 'have so industriously
laboured to deduce themselves from Rome that they have given great
suspicion that in gratitude they desire to return thither, or at least
to meet it half way. Some have evidently laboured to bring in an English
though not a Roman Popery; I mean not only the outside and dress of it,
but equally absolute.... Nay, common fame is more than ordinarily false
if none of them have found a way to reconcile the opinions of Rome to
the preferments of England, and