onal respect, Ken could only view
with unmixed aversion the working of principles which paid little regard
to Church authority and attached small importance to any part of a
Church system that did not clearly rest on plain words of Scripture. No
one, reading without farther information the frequent laments made in
Ken's letters and poems, that his flock had been left without a
shepherd, that it was no longer folded in Catholic and hallowed grounds,
and that it was fed with empoisoned instead of wholesome food, would
think how good a man his successor in the see of Bath and Wells really
was. Bishop Kidder was 'an exemplary and learned man of the simplest and
most charitable character.'[146] Robert Nelson had strongly recommended
him to Archbishop Tillotson. But he held a Low Church view of the
Sacraments; he was inclined to admit, on what some considered too
lenient terms, Dissenters of high character into the ministry of the
English Church; his reverence for primitive tradition was slight; he had
no respect for doctrines of passive obedience and divine right. In Ken's
eyes he was therefore a 'Latitudinarian Traditour.' The deprived bishop
had no wish to resume his see. It was more than once offered to him in
Queen Anne's reign, when the oath of allegiance would no longer have
been an insuperable obstacle. But throughout the life of his first
successor his anxiety about his former diocese was very great, and his
satisfaction was extreme when Kidder was succeeded by Hooper, a bishop
of kindred principles to his own. And Ken was in these respects a fair
representative of many who thought with him. To them the Christian
faith, not in its fundamentals only, but in all the principal
accessories of its constitution and government, was stereotyped in
forms which could not be departed from without heresy or schism. There
was scarcely any margin left for self-adaptation to changed requirements
and varied modes of thought, no ready scope for elasticity and
development. As Christianity had been left in the age of the first three
councils, so it was to remain until the end of time. The first reformers
had reformed it from its corruptions once and for all. The guardians of
its purity had only to walk loyally in their steps, carry out their
principles, and not be misled by any so-called reformer of a later day,
whose meddling hands would only have marred the finished beauty of an
accomplished work of restoration.

Such opinions, when