e usage. Their High Churchmanship took rather the form of an
ecclesiastical toryism, persuaded more than ever of the unique
excellence of the English Church, its divinely constituted government,
and its high, if not exclusive title to purity and orthodoxy of
doctrine. The whole party shared, in fact, to a very great extent in the
spiritual dulness which fell like a blight upon the religious life of
the country at large. A secondary, but still an important difference,
consisted in the change effected by the Revolution in the relation
between the Church and the Crown. The harsh revulsion of sentiment,
however beneficial in its ultimate consequences, could not fail to
detract for the time from that peculiar tone of semi-religious loyalty
which in previous generations had been at once the weakness and the
glory of the English Church.

The nonjuring separation was a serious and long-lasting loss to the
Church of England; a loss corresponding in kind, if not in degree, to
what it might have endured, if by a different turn of political and
ecclesiastical circumstances, the most zealous members of the section
headed by Tillotson and Burnet had been ejected from its fold. It is the
distinguishing merit of the English Church that, to a greater extent
probably than any other religious body, it is at once Catholic and
Protestant, and that without any formal assumption of reconciling the
respective claims of authority and private judgment, it admits a wide
field for the latter, without ceasing to attach veneration and deference
to primitive antiquity and to long established order. It is most true
that 'the Church herself is greater, wider, older than any of the
parties within her;'[93] but it is no less certain, that when a leading
party becomes enfeebled in character and influence, as it was by the
defection to the Nonjurors of so many learned and self-sacrificing High
Churchmen, the diminution of vital energy in the whole body is likely to
be far more than proportionate to the number of the seceders, or even to
their individual weight.

Judged by modern feeling, there might seem no very apparent reason why
the Nonjurors should have belonged nearly, if not quite exclusively, to
the same general school of theological thought. In our own days, the
nature of a man's Churchmanship is no key whatever to his opinions upon
matters which trench on politics. High sacramental theories, or profound
reverence for Church tradition and ancient