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