It is easy enough to discover the loopholes in the theory. The contract does not exist, or, at least, it is placed by Warburton "in the same archive with the famous original compact between monarch and people" which has been the object of vast but fruitless searches. Nor does the Act of Submission bear upon its face the marks of that tender care of the protection of an independent society which Warburton declared a vital tenet of the Union. Yet such criticisms miss the real significance of the theory. It is really the introduction into English politics of that notion of the two societies which, a century before, Melville and Bellarmine had made so fruitful. With neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit was the separation complete, for the simple reason that each had a secret conviction that the ecclesiastical society was at bottom the superior. Yet the theory was the parent of liberty, if only because it pointed the way to a balance of power between claims which, before, had seemed mutually exclusive.
Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the English Church because its temper, under the ægis of Laudian views, had been in substance theocratic. But after 1692 it aptly expressed the compromise the dominant party of the Church had then in mind. They did, indeed, mistake the power of the Church, or, rather, they submitted to the State so fully that what they had intended for a partnership became an absorption. So that the Erastianism of the eighteenth century goes deep enough to make the Church no more than a moral police department of the State. Saints like Ken and preachers like South are replaced by fashionable prelates like Cornwallis, who made Lambeth Palace an adjunct to Ranelagh Gardens, and self-seeking pluralists like Bishop Watson. The Church could not even perceive the meaning of the Wesleyan revolt; and its charity was the irritating and complacent patronage of the obstrusive Hannah More. Its learning decayed, its intelligence slumbered; and the main function it fulfilled until Newman's advent was the provision of rich preferment to the younger sons of the nobility. It is a far cry from Lake of Chichester and Bishop Ken to a church which was merely an annex to the iniquities of the civil list.
IV
No one can mistake the significance of this conflict. The opponents of Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making. They saw that a Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth their head. If the Church was to be at the mercy of private judgment and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic basis would have to be abandoned. Here, indeed, is the root of the condemnation of Tindal and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their teaching, impossible for the Church to possess an ethos of her own. It was thus against the sovereignty of the State that they protested. Somewhere, a line must be drawn about its functions that the independence of the Church might be safeguarded. For its supporters could not be true to their divine mission if the accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to impose its will upon the Church. The view of it as simply a religious body to which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they repudiated with passion. The life of the Church was not derived from the State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription was to usurp an authority not rightly its own.
The real difficulty of this attitude lay in the establishment. For here the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life must be lived upon terms of her own definition. That was possible before the Reformation; but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of rationalism the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become unacceptable. If the Church was to become so intimately involved with the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to complain, if statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to sacrifice it to the attainment of that ideal. For the real secret of independence is, after all, no more than independence. The Church sought it without being willing to pay the price. And this it is which enabled Hoadly to emerge triumphant from an ordeal where logically he should have failed. The State, by definition is an absorptive animal; and the Church had no right to complain if the price of its privileges was royal supremacy. A century so self-satisfied as the eighteenth would not have faced the difficulties involved in giving political expression to the High Church theory.
Yet the protest remained, and it bore a noble fruit in the next century. The Oxford movement is usually regarded as a return to the seventeenth century, to the ideals, that is to say, of Laud and Andrewes.[13] In fact, its real kinship is with Atterbury and Law. Like them, it was searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like them it discovered that connection with the State means, in the end, the sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political situation. "The State has deserted us," wrote Newman; and the words might have been written of the earlier time. The Oxford movement, indeed, like its predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and when Lord Brougham told the House of Lords that the idea of the Church possessing "absolute and unalienable rights" was a "gross and monstrous anomaly" because it would make impossible the supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the result of a doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first completely defined by Wake and Hoadly. Nor has the history of this controversy ended. "Thoughtful men," the Archbishop of Canterbury has told the House of Lords,[14] "... see the absolute need, if a Church is to be strong and vigorous, for 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.
[13] Cf. my Problem of Sovereignty, Chapter III.
[14] Parliamentary Debates. Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p. 992 (June 3, 1919).
[15] Parliamentary Debates. Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p 1002. The quotation does not fully represent Lord Haldane's views.