and Ken and the younger Ambrose Bonwicke are part of the great Anglican tradition of earnest simplicity which later John Keble was to illustrate for the nineteenth century.  The Nonjurors, as they were called, were not free from bitterness; and the history of their effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph Taylor, to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one.  Not, indeed, that the history even of their decline is without its interest; and the study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the Eastern Church, must always possess a singular interest for students of ecclesiastical history.

Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past.  At the bottom it is the obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they represent.  That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had declared of vital import to his very existence.  Its main opponents, moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men like Andrewes must have felt that when they answered Bellarmine they were in substance also defenders of their Church.  After the great controversy of James I’s reign resistance as a duty had come to be regarded as a main element in Jesuit and Nonconformist teaching; with the result that its antithesis became, as a consequence of the political situation, no less integral a part of Church of England doctrine.  For it was upon the monarchy that the Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made it, the main weapon of the dissenting churches there was little hope that it would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown.  And it is this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like Barrow and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper.  When they urge the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in truth the sovereignty of the Church; and that means the triumph of men who looked with contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of every sect.  The Church of England taught non-resistance as the condition of its own survival.

How deep-rooted this doctrine had become in the course of the seventeenth century the writings of men like Mainwaring and Sanderson sufficiently show; yet nothing so completely demonstrates its widespread acceptance as the result of the Revolution.  Four hundred clergy abandoned their preferment because James ruled by Divine Right; and they could not in conscience resist even his iniquities.  An able tract of 1689[10] had collected much material to show how integral the doctrine was to the beliefs of the Church.  Had William’s government, indeed, refrained from the imposition of the oath, it is possible that there might have been no schism at all; for the early