Harold J. Laski

The parties of the time had, as he sees, become divided by no difference save that of interest; and herein, at least, he shows us how completely the principles of the Revolution had become exhausted.

We are told that parties are mainly moved by the prospect of enjoying office and vast patronage; and a great enough show is made of his hatred for corruption as to convince at least some critics of distinction of his sincerity.

So that the chief end of patriotism is its maintenance; though we are never told what liberty is, nor how it is to be maintained.

The divine right of kings is too stupid to be worth the trouble of refutation; all that makes a king important is the authority he exerts.

A clear vision, of course, he has, and he was not beguiled by high notions of prerogative or the like.

Intrigue, a sudden dislike, some backstairs piece of gossip, here is the real root of great changes.

At bottom what mainly impresses him is the immense influence of personal accident upon events.

Experience is to be the test of truth, since history is philosophy teaching by example.

Much, doubtless, is due to that personal fascination which made him the inspiration of men so different as Pope and Voltaire; and the man who could supply ideas to Chatham and Disraeli cannot be wholly devoid of merit.

A solemn trifler," Lord Morley has called him; and it is difficult to know why his easy declamation was so long mistaken for profound thought.

His foundation, moreover, of the Craftsman--the first official journal of a political party in England--showed his appreciation of the technique of political controversy.

An able speaker, without being a great orator, a superb administrator, eager rather for power than for good, rating men low by instinct and corrupting them by intelligence, Walpole was not the man, either in type of mind or of temperament…

It is, in fact, the character of the minister which sets the keynote of the time.

A free church in a free state," now, as then, may be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to build it.

Like them, it was searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like them it discovered that connection with the State means, in the end, the sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political situation.

The State, by definition is an absorptive animal; and the Church had no right to complain if the price of its privileges was royal supremacy.

The Church sought it without being willing to pay the price.

If the Church was to become so intimately involved with the State as an establishment implied, it had no right to complain, if statesmen with a genius for expediency were willing to sacrifice it to the attainment of that ideal.

That was possible before the Reformation; but with the advent of Nonconformity and the growth of rationalism the exclusive character of the Church's solution had become unacceptable.

For here the Church was, at bottom, declaring that the State life must be lived upon terms of her own definition.

The life of the Church was not derived from the State; and for the latter to attempt its circumscription was to usurp an authority not rightly its own.

The view of it as simply a religious body to which the State had conceded certain rights and dignities, they repudiated with passion.

For its supporters could not be true to their divine mission if the accidental vote of a secular authority was by right to impose its will upon the Church.

Somewhere, a line must be drawn about its functions that the independence of the Church might be safeguarded.

Here, indeed, is the root of the condemnation of Tindal and of Hoadly; for they made it, by their teaching, impossible for the Church to possess an ethos of her own.