English Roman Catholics were almost all Jacobites, and were therefore in close sympathy with them on a matter of very absorbing interest.  But although these influences tended to remove prejudices, the gap that separates Anglican and Roman divinity remained wide as ever.  When the Nonjurors, or a large section of them, cut themselves away from the National Church, they did not in their isolation look towards Rome.  Even the most advanced among their leaders proved, by the energy with which they continued the Protestant controversy, how groundless was the charge sometimes brought against them, that they had adopted Popish doctrines.

It cannot be wondered at, that members of the nonjuring communion felt very keenly the isolated, and, so to say, the sectarian condition in which they were placed.  There were few words dearer to them than that word ‘Catholic,’ which breathes of loving brotherhood in one great Christian body.  And yet outside their own scanty fold they were repelled on every side.  They had been ardently attached to the English Church, and had thought that whatever its imperfections might be in practice, its theory, at all events, approached to perfection.  But now, to the minds of many of them, the ideal had passed away, or had become a shadow.  Since, then, the Church in which they had been brought up had failed them, where should they find intercommunion and sympathy?  Not among English Nonconformists.  Although they might have been willing at one time to concede much to Nonconformist scruples, yet even as fellow-members in one national Church they would have represented opposite poles of ecclesiastical sentiment; and without such a mutual bond of union, the interval which separated Dissenters and Nonjurors was wider than ever it had been.  To come to any terms with Rome was quite out of the question.  Such an alliance would indeed be, as Kettlewell expressed it, ’concordia discors.’[132] Could they then combine with Lutherans or other foreign Protestants?  This at one time seemed possible.  English High Churchmen, Juror and Nonjuror, were inclined to be lenient to deficiencies abroad, in order and ritual, of which they would have been wholly intolerant at home.  Even Dodwell, a man of singularly straitened and rigid views, thought the prospect not unhopeful.  One condition, however, they laid down as absolutely indispensable—­the restoration of a legitimate episcopate.  But the chief promoters of the scheme died nearly coincidently; political questions of immediate concern interfered with its farther consideration, and thus the project was dropped.  The Scotch Episcopal Church remained as a communion with which English Nonjurors could fraternise.  Ken and Beveridge and Kettlewell, and English High Churchmen in general, had long regarded that Church with compassion, sympathy, and interest.  Dr. Hickes, the acknowledged leader of the thorough Nonjurors, had become, as chaplain to the Earl of Lauderdale, well acquainted with its bishops; a large proportion of its clergy were Jacobites and Nonjurors; and, like themselves, they were a depressed and often persecuted remnant.  The intimacy, therefore, between the Scotch Episcopalians and many of the English Nonjurors became, as is well known, very close.