ius of French
socialism in 1840 and onwards, 'how at the bottom of our politics we
always found theology.' It is true at any rate that the association of
political and social change with theological revolution was the most
remarkable of all the influences in the first twenty years of Mr.
Gladstone's public life. Then rose once more into active prominence the
supreme debate, often cutting deep into the labours of the modern
statesman, always near to the heart of the speculations of the
theologian, in many fields urgent in its interest alike to ecclesiastic,
historian, and philosopher, the inquiry: what is a church? This opened
the sluices and let out the floods. What is the church of England? To
ask that question was to ask a hundred others. Creeds, dogmas,
ordinances, hierarchy, parliamentary institution, judicial tribunals,
historical tradition, the prayer-book, the Bible--all these enormous
topics sacred and profane, with all their countless ramifications, were
rapidly swept into a tornado of such controversy as had not been seen in
England since the Revolution. Was the church a purely human creation,
changing with time and circumstance, like all the other creations of
the heart and brain and will of man? Were its bishops mere officers,
like high ministers of mundane state, or were they, in actual historic
truth as in supposed theological necessity, the direct lineal successors
of the first apostles, endowed from the beginning with the mystical
prerogatives on which the efficacy of all sacramental rites depended?
What were its relations to the councils of the first four centuries,
what to the councils of the fifteenth century and the sixteenth, what to
the Fathers? The Scottish presbyterians held the conception of a church
as strongly as anybody;[83] but England, broadly speaking, had never
been persuaded that there could be a church without bishops.

In the answers to this group of hard questions, terrible divisions that
had been long muffled and huddled away burst into view. The stupendous
quarrel of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries again broke out. To
the erastian lawyer the church was an institution erected on principles
of political expediency by act of parliament. To the school of Whately
and Arnold it was a corporation of divine origin, devised to strengthen
men in their struggle for goodness and holiness by the association and
mutual help of fellow-believers. To the evangelical it was hardly more
than a