ormed
Churches abroad, agreed in thinking of the English Church as the chief
bulwark of the Protestant interest.

Projects of comprehension had ended in failure before the eighteenth
century opened. But they were still fresh in memory, and men who had
taken great interest in them were still living, and holding places of
honour. For years to come there were many who greatly regretted that the
scheme of 1689 had not been carried out, and whose minds constantly
recurred to the possibility of another opportunity coming about in their
time. Such ideas, though they scarcely took any practical form, cannot
be left out of account in the Church history of the period. In the midst
of all that strife of parties which characterised Queen Anne's reign, a
longing desire for Church unity was by no means absent. Only these
aspirations had taken by this time a somewhat altered form. The history
of the English Constitution has ever been marked by alternations, in
which Conservatism and attachment to established authority have
sometimes been altogether predominant, at other times a resolute, even
passionate contention for the security and increase of liberty. In Queen
Anne's reign a reaction of the former kind set in, not indeed by any
means universal, but sufficient to contrast very strongly with the
period which had preceded it. One of the symptoms of it was a very
decided current of popular feeling in favour of the Church. People began
to think it possible, or even probable, that with the existing
generation of Dissenters English Nonconformity would so nearly end, as
to be no longer a power that would have to be taken into any practical
account. Concession, therefore, to the scruples of 'weak brethren'
seemed to be no longer needful; and if alterations were not really
called for, evidently they would be only useless and unsettling. In
this reign, therefore, aspirations after unity chiefly took the form of
friendly overtures between Church dignitaries in England and the
Lutheran and other reformed communities abroad, as also with such
leaders of the Gallican party as were inclined, if possible, to throw
off the Papal supremacy and to effect at the same time certain religious
and ecclesiastical reforms. Throughout the middle of the century there
was not so much any craving for unity as what bore some outward
resemblance to it, an indolent love of mere tranquillity. The
correspondence, however, that passed between Doddridge and some of th