that of a bundle of privileges. The environing warmth of privilege seemed to be of the very life's essence of the Church. To possess and maintain distinctively for her members, privileges—pecuniary, political, ecclesiastical—which others of the community, outside her religious pale, had not, seemed the main triumph of good churchmanship. I have already alluded to the first great blow, happily and successfully struck, and, to the Church's great credit, struck from within her own body, at this very low system. The success of this first step, on behalf of the Church's standing and influence, was so remarkable, that others afterwards followed, in the anti-temporalities war of those times, until the Church could at length claim that she stood upon her own inherent strength, with no privilege whatever that was not equally attainable by any other religious body of the common country. This lofty and independent position prepared her for a further movement, which proved of the highest importance for her future extension and usefulness.
Many questions had been accumulating for the Church in those times, arising, on the one hand, out of advanced science and biblical criticism, and, on the other, out of the old contention as to Tradition versus Scripture. Protestantism arose to replace the latter in supremacy; while historical research over the ground of Church and Episcopate had latterly shown that, however convenient and suitable as a human development, these must not take precedence of "The Word of God." Was our national Church, therefore, truly Protestant in this sense; or, abhorring the very name, as her very "High" section would express it, did she contradictorily follow suit with her
