cern interfered with its farther consideration, and thus
the project was dropped. The Scotch Episcopal Church remained as a
communion with which English Nonjurors could fraternise. Ken and
Beveridge and Kettlewell, and English High Churchmen in general, had
long regarded that Church with compassion, sympathy, and interest. Dr.
Hickes, the acknowledged leader of the thorough Nonjurors, had become,
as chaplain to the Earl of Lauderdale, well acquainted with its bishops;
a large proportion of its clergy were Jacobites and Nonjurors; and,
like themselves, they were a depressed and often persecuted remnant. The
intimacy, therefore, between the Scotch Episcopalians and many of the
English Nonjurors became, as is well known, very close.

There was, however, one other great body of Christians towards whom,
after a time, the nonjuring separatists turned with proposals of amity
and intercommunion. This was the Eastern Church. Various causes had
contributed to remove something of the obscurity which had once shrouded
this vast communion from the knowledge of Englishmen. As far back as the
earlier part of Charles I.'s reign, the attention of either party in the
English Church had been fixed for a time on the overtures made by
Cyrillus Lukaris,[133] patriarch, first of Alexandria, and then of
Constantinople, to whom we owe the precious gift of the 'Alexandrian
manuscript' of the Scriptures. Archbishop Abbot, a Calvinist, and one of
the first representatives of the so-called Latitudinarian party, had
been attracted by the inclinations evinced by this remarkable man
towards the theology of Holland and Geneva. His successor and complete
opposite, Archbishop Laud, had been no less fascinated by the idea of
closer intercourse with a Church of such ancient splendour and such
pretensions to primitive orthodoxy. At the close of the seventeenth
century this interest had been renewed by the visit of Peter the Great
to this island. With a mind greedy after all manner of information, he
had not omitted to inquire closely into ecclesiastical matters. People
heard of his conversations on these subjects with Tenison and
Burnet,[134] and wondered how far a monarch who was a kind of Pope in
his own empire would be leavened with Western and Protestant ideas. In
learned and literary circles too the Eastern Church had been discussed.
The Oxford and Cambridge Platonists, than whom England has never
produced more thoughtful and scholarlike divines, had pr