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.