It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory.  The contract does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton “in the same archive with the famous original compact between monarch and people” which has been the object of vast but fruitless searches.  Nor does the Act of Submission bear upon its face the marks of that tender care of the protection of an independent society which Warburton declared a vital tenet of the Union.  Yet such criticisms miss the real significance of the theory.  It is really the introduction into English politics of that notion of the two societies which, a century before, Melville and Bellarmine had made so fruitful.  With neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit was the separation complete, for the simple reason that each had a secret conviction that the ecclesiastical society was at bottom the superior.  Yet the theory was the parent of liberty, if only because it pointed the way to a balance of power between claims which, before, had seemed mutually exclusive.

Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the English Church because its temper, under the aegis of Laudian views, had been in substance theocratic.  But after 1692 it aptly expressed the compromise the dominant party of the Church had then in mind.  They did, indeed, mistake the power of the Church, or, rather, they submitted to the State so fully that what they had intended for a partnership became an absorption.  So that the Erastianism of the eighteenth century goes deep enough to make the Church no more than a moral police department of the State.  Saints like Ken and preachers like South are replaced by fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who made Lambeth Palace an adjunct to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson.  The Church could not even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and its charity was the irritating and complacent patronage of the obstrusive Hannah More.  Its learning decayed, its intelligence slumbered; and the main function it fulfilled until Newman’s advent was the provision of rich preferment to the younger sons of the nobility.  It is a far cry from Lake of Chichester and Bishop Ken to a church which was merely an annex to the iniquities of the civil list.

IV

No one can mistake the significance of this conflict.  The opponents of Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making.  They saw that a Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth their head.  If the Church was to be at the mercy of private judgment and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic basis would have to be abandoned.  Here, indeed, is the root of the condemnation of Tindal and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their teaching, impossible for the Church to possess an ethos of her own.  It