was thus against the sovereignty of the State that they protested.  Somewhere, a line must be drawn about its functions that the independence of the Church might be safeguarded.  For its supporters could not be true to their divine mission if the accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to impose its will upon the Church.  The view of it as simply a religious body to which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they repudiated with passion.  The life of the Church was not derived from the State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription was to usurp an authority not rightly its own.

The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment.  For here the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life must be lived upon terms of her own definition.  That was possible before the Reformation; but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of rationalism the exclusive character of the Church’s solution had become unacceptable.  If the Church was to become so intimately involved with the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to complain, if statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to sacrifice it to the attainment of that ideal.  For the real secret of independence is, after all, no more than independence.  The Church sought it without being willing to pay the price.  And this it is which enabled Hoadly to emerge triumphant from an ordeal where logically he should have failed.  The State, by definition is an absorptive animal; and the Church had no right to complain if the price of its privileges was royal supremacy.  A century so self-satisfied as the eighteenth would not have faced the difficulties involved in giving political expression to the High Church theory.

Yet the protest remained, and it bore a noble fruit in the next century.  The Oxford movement is usually regarded as a return to the seventeenth century, to the ideals, that is to say, of Laud and Andrewes.[13] In fact, its real kinship is with Atterbury and Law.  Like them, it was searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like them it discovered that connection with the State means, in the end, the sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political situation.  “The State has deserted us,” wrote Newman; and the words might have been written of the earlier time.  The Oxford movement, indeed, like its predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and when Lord Brougham told the House of Lords that the idea of the Church possessing “absolute and unalienable rights” was a “gross and monstrous anomaly” because it would make impossible the supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the result of a doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first completely defined by Wake and Hoadly.  Nor has the history of this controversy ended.  “Thoughtful men,” the Archbishop of Canterbury has told the House of Lords,[14] “... see the absolute need, if a Church is to be strong and vigorous, for