it shall scarce have any being or subsistence, or so much as the face of a National Church to be known by.’[367] South’s sermon was on the appropriate text, ’not give place, no, not for an hour.’  His picture was doubtless a highly exaggerated one.  The discretionary powers which some of the schemes of comprehension proposed to give would not have left the Church of England a mere scene of confusion, an unseemly Babel of anarchy and licence.  A sketch might be artfully drawn, in which nothing should be introduced but what was truthfully selected from the practices of different London Churches of the present day, which might easily make a foreigner imagine that in the National Church uniformity and order were things unknown.  Yet practically, its unity remains unbroken; and the inconveniences arising from such divergences are very slight as compared with the advantages which result from them, and with the general life and elasticity of which they are at once both causes and symptoms.  Good feeling, sound sense, and the natural instinct of order would have done much to abate the disorders of even a large relaxation of the Act of Uniformity.  In 1689, before yet the course taken by the Revolution had kindled the strong spirit of party, there was nothing like the heat of feeling in regard of such usages as the wearing of the surplice, kneeling at the Communion, and the sign of the cross at Baptism, as there had been in the earlier part of Elizabeth’s reign.  When prejudices began to pass away, prevailing practice would probably have been guided, after an interval, by the rule of the ’survival of the fittest,’—­of those customs, that is, which best suited the temper of the people and the spirit of the Church.  The surplice, for instance, would very likely have become gradually universal, much in the same manner as in our own day it has gradually superseded the gown in the pulpit.  A concession to Nonconformist scruples of some discretionary power in regard of a few ceremonies and observances would certainly not have brought upon the National Church the ruin foreboded by Dr. South.  Possibly a licensed variety of usage might have had indirectly a somewhat wholesome influence.  The mild excitement of controversies about matters in themselves almost indifferent might have tended, like a gentle blister, to ward off the lethargy which, in the eighteenth century, paralysed to so great an extent the spiritual energies of the Church.  No one can doubt that Dr. South’s remarks expressed in vigorous language genuine difficulties.  But it was equally obvious that if the National Church were to be laced on a wider basis, as the opportunities of the time seemed to demand, a relaxation of uniformity of some kind or another was indispensable.  It did not seem to occur to the reformers and revisionists of the time that a concession of optional powers was a somewhat crude, nor by any means the only solution of the difficulty; and that it might be quite possible to meet all reasonable scruples of Nonconformists without in any way infringing upon customs which all old members of the Church of England were well satisfied to retain.