their effort, after the consecration of Hilkiah Bedford and Ralph
Taylor, to perpetuate the schism is a lamentable one. Not, indeed, that
the history even of their decline is without its interest; and the
study, alike of their liturgy and their attempt at reunion with the
Eastern Church, must always possess a singular interest for students of
ecclesiastical history.

Yet the real interest of the Nonjuring schism was political rather than
religious; and its roots go out to vital events of the past. At the
bottom it is the obverse side of the Divine Right of kings that they
represent. That theory, which was the main weapon of the early secular
state against the pretensions of Rome, must naturally have commanded the
allegiance of members of a church which James I, its main exponent, had
declared of vital import to his very existence. Its main opponents,
moreover, were Catholics and Dissenters; so that men like Andrewes must
have felt that when they answered Bellarmine they were in substance also
defenders of their Church. After the great controversy of James I's
reign resistance as a duty had come to be regarded as a main element in
Jesuit and Nonconformist teaching; with the result that its antithesis
became, as a consequence of the political situation, no less integral a
part of Church of England doctrine. For it was upon the monarchy that
the Church had come to depend for its existence; and if resistance to
the king were made, as Knox and Bellarmine had in substance made it, the
main weapon of the dissenting churches there was little hope that it
would continue to exist once the monarchy was overthrown. And it is
this, unquestionably, which explains why stout ecclesiastics like Barrow
and Jackson can write in what seems so Erastian a temper. When they urge
the sovereignty of the State, their thesis is in truth the sovereignty
of the Church; and that means the triumph of men who looked with
contemptuous hatred upon Nonconformists of every sect. The Church of