Harold J. Laski

The opponents of Erastianism had a deep sense of their corporate Church, and it was a plea for ecclesiastical freedom that they were making.

They saw that a Church whose patronage and discipline and debates were under the control of an alien body could not with honesty claim that Christ was in truth their head.

If the Church was to be at the mercy of private judgment and political expediency, the notion of a dogmatic basis would have to be abandoned.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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…

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.