ection of the English Church to
repeat many of the failings as well as many of the virtues which had
characterised the Church of the third and fourth centuries. It copied,
for instance, far too faithfully, the disposition which primitive ages
had early manifested, to magnify unduly the spiritual power and
prerogatives of the priesthood. No doubt the outcry against
sacerdotalism was often perverted to disingenuous uses. Many a hard blow
was dealt against vital Christian doctrine under the guise of righteous
war against the exorbitant pretensions of the clergy. But Sacerdotalism
certainly attained a formidable height among some of the High Churchmen
of the period, both Jurors and Nonjurors. Dodwell, who declined orders
that he might defend all priestly rights from a better vantage ground,
did more harm to the cause he had espoused than any one of its
opponents, by fearlessly pressing the theory into consequences from
which a less thorough or a more cautious advocate would have recoiled
with dismay. Robert Nelson's sobriety of judgment and sound practical
sense made him a far more effective champion. He too, like Dodwell,
rejoiced that from his position as a layman he could without prejudice
resist what he termed a sacrilegious invasion of the rights of the
priests of the Lord.[145] The beginning of the eighteenth century was
felt to be a time of crisis in the contest which, for the last three or
four hundred years, has been incessantly waged between those whose
tendency is ever to reduce religion into its very simplest elements, and
those, on the other hand, in whose eyes the whole order of Church
government and discipline is a divinely constituted system of mysterious
powers and superhuman influences. It is a contest in which opinions may
vary in all degrees, from pure Deism to utter Ultramontanism. The High
Churchmen in question insisted that their position, and theirs only, was
precisely that of the Church in early post-Apostolic times, when
doctrine had become fully defined, but was as yet uncorrupted by later
superstitions. It was not very tenable ground, but it was held by them
with a pertinacity and sincerity of conviction which deepened the
fervour of their faith, even while it narrowed its sympathies and
cramped it with restrictions. A Church in which they found what they
demanded; which was primitive and reformed; which was free from the
errors of Rome and Geneva; which was not only Catholic and orthodox on
all d