th which they asserted them against all
impugners--great, above all, as was the religious and spiritual
importance with which their zeal for the cause invested these
semi-political doctrines, yet it is not on such grounds that their
interest as a Church party chiefly rests. No weight of circumstances
could confer a more than secondary value on tenets which have no
permanent bearing on the Christian life, and engage attention only
under external and temporary conditions. The early Nonjurors, and their
doctrinal sympathisers within the National Church, were a body of men
from whom many in modern times have taken pleasure in deriving their
ecclesiastical pedigree, not as upholders of nearly obsolete opinions
about divine right and passive obedience, but as the main link between
the High Churchmen of a previous age and their successors at a much
later period. To the revivers in this century of the Anglo-Catholic
theology, it seemed as though the direct succession of sound English
divines ended with Bull and Beveridge, was partially continued, as by a
side line, in some of the Nonjurors, and then dwindled and almost died
out, until after the lapse of a hundred years its vitality was again
renewed.

On points of doctrine and discipline the early Nonjurors differed in
nothing from the High Churchmen whose communion they had deserted. Some
of them called themselves, it is true, 'the old Church of England,' 'the
Catholic and faithful remnant' which alone adhered to 'the orthodox and
rightful bishops,' and bitter charges, mounting up to that of apostacy,
were directed against the 'compliant' majority. But, wide as was the
gulf, and heinous as was the sin by which, according to such Nonjurors,
the Established Church had separated itself from primitive faith, the
asserted defection consisted solely in this, that it had committed the
sin of rebellion in forsaking its divinely appointed King, and the sin
of schism in rejecting the authority of its canonical bishops. No one
contended that there were further points of difference between the two
communions. Dr. Bowes asked Blackburn, one of their bishops, whether 'he
was so happy as to belong to his diocese?' 'Dear friend,' was the
answer, 'we leave the sees open that the gentlemen who now unjustly
possess them, upon the restoration, may, if they please, return to their
duty and be continued. We content ourselves with full episcopal power as
suffragans.' The introduction, however, in 17