To return to the beginning of the period under review.  ‘Divine right,’ ‘Passive obedience,’ ‘Non-resistance,’ are phrases which long ago have lost life, and which sound over the gulf of time like faint and shadowy echoes of controversies which belong to an already distant past.  Even in the middle of the century it must have been difficult to realise the vehemence with which the semi-religious, semi-political, doctrines contained in those terms had been disputed and maintained in the generation preceding.  Yet round those doctrines, in defence or in opposition, some of the best and most honourable principles of human nature used to be gathered—­a high-minded love of liberty on the one hand, a no less lofty spirit of self-sacrifice and loyalty on the other.

The open or half-concealed Jacobitism which, for many years after the Revolution, prevailed in perhaps the majority of eighteenth-century parsonages could scarcely fail of influencing the English Church at large, both in its general action, and in its relation to the State.  This influence was in many respects a very mischievous one.  In country parishes, and still more so in the universities, it fostered an unquiet political spirit which was prejudicial both to steady pastoral work and to the advancement of sound learning.  It also greatly disturbed the internal unity of the Church, and that in a manner peculiarly prejudicial to its well-being.  Strong doctrinal and ecclesiastical differences within a Church may do much more good in stirring a wholesome spirit of emulation, and in keeping thought alive and preventing a Church from narrowing into a sect, than they do harm by creating a spirit of division.  But the semi-political element which infused its bitterness into Church parties during the first half of the eighteenth century, had no such merit.  It did nothing to promote either practical activity or theological inquiry.  Under its influence High and Broad Church were too often not so much rival schools of religious thought, and representatives of different tones of religious feeling, as rival factions.  King William’s bishops—­a set of men who, on the whole, did very high honour to his selection—­were regarded by a number of the clergy with suspicion and aversion, as his pledged supporters both in political and ecclesiastical matters, no less ready to upset the established order of the Church than they had been to change the ancient succession of the throne.  These, in their turn, scarcely cared to conceal, if not their scorn, at all events their supreme mistrust, for men who seemed in their eyes like bigoted disturbers of a Constitution in which the country had every reason to rejoice.