Page:The Irish Church and its Formularies.djvu/19

 Church be viewed as a whole—not as it emerged from the crucible of the Reformation, one body welded together by the stern hammer blows of Tudor potentates and trembling parliaments, in whose eyes to be a subject was to be a church-man, and to be a non-conformist was to be a rebel—but as it exists at present, rooted firmly, because widely, in the different affections of many men, whose temperament and whose mental process are as diverse as their social stations or political prepossessions?

The Church of England, as it exists not by its title-deeds but in actual practice, comprehends three subsections, willing and able to pull together, as from other considerations, some moral and others material, so by their joint acquiescence in a Prayer Book, inherited by all now living, and manipulated by none. Of these subsections two are of ancient lineage, and they possess their distinct characteristics of old date and well-defined outline. The High Church one is often accused of an undue leaning towards Rome, and it repudiates the imputation; while the Low Church has as often to listen to the charge of undue Genevan predilections, and is as emphatic in denying that the points on which that imputation is based involve any disloyalty to the English Church, or preference for the system of Calvin. The third subsection, the Broad Church, was first invested with its distinctive appellation in our own time in an article contributed to the 'Edinburgh Review' by the late Mr. Conybeare. The term was eagerly caught at, and its epigrammatic vigour served to rally an otherwise very incohesive body of independent thinkers. The indictment laid against this party is, that its predilections are unduly enlisted in favour of the rationalising schools of Protestant Germany and Voltairian France; and it does not in the case of many of its representative members repudiate the charge as anything to excuse or to be ashamed of.