In the hundred and twenty years which passed between the Bangorian Controversy and the Oxford Movement, there is only one volume upon the problem of Church and State which deserves more than passing notice.  Bishop Warburton was the Lord Brougham of his age; and as its self-constituted universal provider of intellectual fare, he deemed it his duty to settle this, amongst others of the eternal questions.  The effort excited only the contempt of Leslie Stephen—­“the peculiar Warburton mixture,” he says “of sham logic and bluster.”  Yet that is hardly fair to the total result of Warburton’s remarks.  He tried to steer a middle path between the logical result of such Erastianism as that of the Independent Whig, on the one hand, and the excessive claim of High Churchmanship on the other.  Naturally enough, or the writer would not be Warburton, the book is full of tawdry rhetoric and stupid quibbles.  But the Alliance between Church and State (1736) set the temper of speculation until the advent of Newman, and is therefore material for something more than contempt.  It acutely points out that societies generate a personality distinct from that of their members in words reminiscent of an historic legal pronouncement.[12] “When any number of men,” he says, “form themselves into a society, whether civil or religious, this society becomes a body different from that aggregate which the number of individuals composed before the society was formed....  But a body must have its proper personality and will, which without these is no more than a shadow or a name.”

[Footnote 12:  Dicey, Law and Opinion in England (2nd edition), p. 165.]

And that is the root of Warburton’s pronouncement.  The Church is a society distinct from the State, but lending to that body its assistance because without the sanction of religion the full achievement of the social purpose is impossible.  There is thus an alliance between them, each lending its support to the other for their common benefit.  The two remain distinct; the union between them is of a federal kind.  But they interchange their powers, and this it is which explains at once the royal supremacy and the right of Churchmen to a share in the legislature.  This also it is which explains the existence of a Test Act, whereby those who might injure that which the State has undertaken to protect are deprived of their power to evil.  And, in return, the Church engages to “apply its utmost endeavors in the service of the State.”  It becomes attached to its benefactor from the privilege it receives; and the dangers which might arise from its natural independence are thus obviated.  For a federal union precludes the grave problem of an imperium in imperio, and the “mischiefs which so terrified Hobbes” are met by the terms upon which it is founded.