o be Catholic in its institutional conception,
which was now bound up with a particular state and also with a
particular conception of that state. To the native Irishman and the
Scotsman, as indeed to most Englishmen, the Anglican Church was one of
the main buttresses of the supremacy of the English crown and nation.
This conception of the relations of church and state was hardly
favourable to missionary zeal; and in the age succeeding the
Reformation there was no disposition on the part of the English Church
to emulate the wonderful activity of the Jesuits, which, in the 16th
and 17th centuries, brought to the Church of Rome in countries beyond
the ocean compensation for what she had lost in Europe through the
Protestant reformation. Even when English churchmen passed beyond the
seas, they carried with them their creed, but not their ecclesiastical
organization. Prejudice and real or imaginary legal obstacles stood in
the way of the erection of episcopal sees in the colonies; and though
in the 17th century Archbishop Laud had attempted to obtain a bishop
for Virginia, up to the time of the American revolution the churchmen
of the colonies had to make the best of the legal fiction that
their spiritual needs were looked after by the bishop of London, who
occasionally sent commissaries to visit them and ordained candidates
for the ministry sent to England for the purpose.

The change which has made it possible for Anglican churchmen to claim
that their communion ranks with those of Rome and the Orthodox East
as one of the three great historical divisions of the Catholic Church,
was due, in the first instance, to the American revolution. The
severance of the colonies from their allegiance to the crown brought
the English bishops for the first time face to face with the idea of
an Anglican Church which should have nothing to do either with the
royal supremacy or with British nationality. When, on the conclusion
of peace, the church-people of Connecticut sent Dr. Samuel Seabury to
England, with a request to the archbishop of Canterbury to consecrate
him, it is not surprising that Archbishop Moore refused. In the
opinion of prelates and lawyers alike, an act of parliament was
necessary before a bishop could be consecrated for a see abroad; to
consecrate one for a foreign country seemed impossible, since, though
the bestowal of the _potestas ordinis_ would be valid, the crown,
which, according to the law, was the source of the