the Church, qua church, to be able to say what it can do as a church.”  “The rule of the sovereign, the rule of Parliament,” replied Lord Haldane,[15] “extend as far as the rule of the Church.  They are not to be distinguished or differentiated, and that was the condition under which ecclesiastical power was transmitted to the Church of England.”  Today, that is to say, as in the past, antithetic theories of the nature of the State hinge, in essence, upon the problem of its sovereignty.  “A free church in a free state,” now, as then, may be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to build it.

[Footnote 13:  Cf. my Problem of Sovereignty, Chapter III.]

[Footnote 14:  Parliamentary Debates.  Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p. 992 (June 3, 1919).]

[Footnote 15:  Parliamentary Debates.  Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p 1002.  The quotation does not fully represent Lord Haldane’s views.]

CHAPTER IV

THE ERA OF STAGNATION

I

With the accession of George I, there ensued an era of unexampled calm in English politics, which lasted until the expulsion of Walpole from power in 1742.  No vital questions were debated, nor did problems of principle force themselves into view; and if the Jacobites remained in the background as an element invincibly hostile to absorption, the failure of their effort in 1715 showed how feeble was their hold on English opinion.  Not, indeed, that the new dynasty was popular.  It had nothing of that romantic glamour of a lost cause so imperishably recorded in Scott’s pages.  The first Georges were heavy and foreign and meagre-souled; but at least they were Protestant, and, until the reign of George III, they were amenable to management.  In the result, an opposition in the classic sense was hardly needed; for the only question to be considered was the personalities who were to share in power.  The dominating temper of Walpole decided that issue; and he gave thereby to the political struggle the outlines in which it was encased for a generation.

It is a dull period, but complacent; for it was not an unprosperous time.  Agriculture and commerce both were abundant; and the increasing development of towns shows us that the Industrial Revolution loomed in the near distance.  The eager continuance of the deistic controversy suggests that there was something of novelty beneath the calm; for Tindal and Woolston and Chubb struck at the root of religious belief, and Shaftesbury’s exaltation of Hellenism not only contributed to the Aufklarung in Scotland, but suggested that Christian ideals were not to go unchallenged.  But the literature of the time is summarized in Pope; and the easy neatness of his verses is quaintly representative of the Georgian peace.  Defoe and Swift had both done their work; and the latter had withdrawn to Ireland to die like a rat in