t the Creed, the
Gloria Patri, and the reading of the Gospel; and others sitting, and
perhaps laughing and winking upon their fellow schismatics, in scoff of
those who practise the decent order of the Church.' Irreconcilable
parties, he adds, and factions will be created. 'I will not hear this
formalist, says one; and I will not hear that schismatic (with better
reason), says another.... So that I dare avouch, that to bring in a
comprehension is nothing else but, in plain terms, to establish a schism
in the Church by law, and so bring a plague into the very bowels of it,
which is more than sufficiently endangered already by having one in its
neighbourhood; a plague which shall eat out the very heart and soul, and
consume the vitals and spirit of it, and this to such a degree, that in
the compass of a few years it shall scarce have any being or
subsistence, or so much as the face of a National Church to be known
by.'[367] South's sermon was on the appropriate text, 'not give place,
no, not for an hour.' His picture was doubtless a highly exaggerated
one. The discretionary powers which some of the schemes of comprehension
proposed to give would not have left the Church of England a mere scene
of confusion, an unseemly Babel of anarchy and licence. A sketch might
be artfully drawn, in which nothing should be introduced but what was
truthfully selected from the practices of different London Churches of
the present day, which might easily make a foreigner imagine that in the
National Church uniformity and order were things unknown. Yet
practically, its unity remains unbroken; and the inconveniences arising
from such divergences are very slight as compared with the advantages
which result from them, and with the general life and elasticity of
which they are at once both causes and symptoms. Good feeling, sound
sense, and the natural instinct of order would have done much to abate
the disorders of even a large relaxation of the Act of Uniformity. In
1689, before yet the course taken by the Revolution had kindled the
strong spirit of party, there was nothing like the heat of feeling in
regard of such usages as the wearing of the surplice, kneeling at the
Communion, and the sign of the cross at Baptism, as there had been in
the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign. When prejudices began to pass
away, prevailing practice would probably have been guided, after an
interval, by the rule of the 'survival of the fittest,'--of those
custom