The problem of the Church’s government was hardly less complex.  The very acerbity with which it was discussed proclaims that we are in an age of settlement.  Much of the dispute, indeed, is doubtless due to the dislike of all High Churchmen for William; with their consequent unwillingness to admit the full meaning of his ecclesiastical supremacy.  Much also is due to the fact that the bench of bishops, despite great figures like Tillotson and Wake, was necessarily chosen for political aptitude rather than for religious value.  Nor did men like Burnet and Hoadly, for all their learning, make easy the path for brethren of more tender consciences.  The Church, moreover, must have felt its powers the more valuable from the very strength of the assault to which she was subjected.  And the direct interference with her governance implied by the Oaths of Allegiance and of Abjuration raised questions we have not yet solved.  It suggested the subordination of Church to State; and men like Hickes and Leslie were quick to point out the Erastianism of the age.  It is a fact inevitable in the situation of the English Church that the charge of subjection to the State should rouse a deep and quick resentment.  She cannot be a church unless she is a societas perfecta; she cannot have within herself the elements of perfect fellowship if what seem the plain commands of Christ are to be at the mercy of the king in Parliament.  That is the difficulty which lies at the bottom of the debate with Wake in one age and with Hoadly in the next.  In some sort, it is the problem of sovereignty that is here at issue; and it is in this sense that the problems of the Revolution are linked with the Oxford Movement.  But Newman and his followers are the unconscious sponsors of a debate which grows in volume; and to discuss the thoughts of Wake and Hoadly and Law is thus, in a vital aspect, the study of contemporary ideas.

We are not here concerned with the wisdom of those of William’s advisers who exacted an oath of allegiance from the clergy.  It raised in acute form the validity of a doctrine which had, for more than a century, been the main foundation of the alliance between throne and altar in England.  The demand precipitated a schism which lingered on, though fitfully, until the threshold of the nineteenth century.  The men who could not take the oath were, many of them, among the most distinguished churchmen of the time.  Great ecclesiastics like Sancroft, the archbishop of Canterbury and one of the seven who had gained immortality by his resistance to James, saints like Ken, the bishop of Bath and Wells, scholars like George Hickes and Henry Dodwell, men like Charles Leslie, born with a genius for recrimination; much, it is clear, of what was best in the Church of England was to be found amongst them.  There is not a little of beauty, and much of pathos in their history.  Most, after their deprivation, were condemned to poverty; few of them recanted.  The lives of men like Sancroft