Projects of comprehension had ended in failure before the eighteenth century opened.  But they were still fresh in memory, and men who had taken great interest in them were still living, and holding places of honour.  For years to come there were many who greatly regretted that the scheme of 1689 had not been carried out, and whose minds constantly recurred to the possibility of another opportunity coming about in their time.  Such ideas, though they scarcely took any practical form, cannot be left out of account in the Church history of the period.  In the midst of all that strife of parties which characterised Queen Anne’s reign, a longing desire for Church unity was by no means absent.  Only these aspirations had taken by this time a somewhat altered form.  The history of the English Constitution has ever been marked by alternations, in which Conservatism and attachment to established authority have sometimes been altogether predominant, at other times a resolute, even passionate contention for the security and increase of liberty.  In Queen Anne’s reign a reaction of the former kind set in, not indeed by any means universal, but sufficient to contrast very strongly with the period which had preceded it.  One of the symptoms of it was a very decided current of popular feeling in favour of the Church.  People began to think it possible, or even probable, that with the existing generation of Dissenters English Nonconformity would so nearly end, as to be no longer a power that would have to be taken into any practical account.  Concession, therefore, to the scruples of ‘weak brethren’ seemed to be no longer needful; and if alterations were not really called for, evidently they would be only useless and unsettling.  In this reign, therefore, aspirations after unity chiefly took the form of friendly overtures between Church dignitaries in England and the Lutheran and other reformed communities abroad, as also with such leaders of the Gallican party as were inclined, if possible, to throw off the Papal supremacy and to effect at the same time certain religious and ecclesiastical reforms.  Throughout the middle of the century there was not so much any craving for unity as what bore some outward resemblance to it, an indolent love of mere tranquillity.  The correspondence, however, that passed between Doddridge and some of the bishops, and the interest excited by the ’Free and Candid Disquisitions,’ showed that ideas of Church comprehension were not yet forgotten.  About this date, another cause, in addition to the quieta non movere principle, interfered to the hindrance of any such proposals.  Persons who entertained Arian and other heterodox opinions upon the doctrine of the Trinity were an active and increasing party; and there was fear lest any attempt to enlarge the borders of the Church should only, or chiefly, result in their procuring some modifications of the Liturgy in their favour.  Later in the century, the general question revived