as was contemplated by Du Pin and Wake might have been quite free from one-sidedness of this description.  It need not have interfered with or discouraged, it should rather have tended to promote, the near intercourse, which many English Churchmen were greatly desirous of, with the National Church of Scotland and with the reformed Churches of the Continent.  A relation of this kind with her sister Churches on either hand would have been in perfect harmony both with the original standpoint of the Church of England, and with an important office it may perhaps be called to in the future.  It was in reference to the sympathetic reception given in this country to many of the proscribed bishops and clergy of France at the time of the great revolution, that the Count de Maistre made a remark which has often struck readers as well worthy of notice.  ’If ever,’—­he said, ’and everything invites to it—­there should be a movement towards reunion among the Christian bodies, it seems likely that the Church of England should be the one to give it impulse.  Presbyterianism, as its French nature rendered probable, went to extremes.  Between us and those who practise a worship which we think wanting in form and substance, there is too wide an interval; we cannot understand one another.  But the English Church, which touches us with the one hand, touches with the other those with whom we have no point of contact.’[308]

Archbishop Wake, had he lived in more favourable times, would have been well fitted, both by position and character, for this work of mutual conciliation.  His disposition toward the foreign Protestant Churches was of the most friendly kind.  In a letter to Le Clerc on the subject,[309] he deprecated dissension on matters of no essential moment.  He desired to be on terms of cordial friendship with the Reformed Churches, notwithstanding their points of difference from that of England.  He could wish they had a moderate Episcopal government, according to the primitive model; nor did he yet despair of it, if not in his own time, perhaps in days to come.  He would welcome a closer union among all the Reformed bodies, at almost any price.  The advantages he anticipated from such a result would be immense.  Any approximations in Church government or Church offices which might conduce to it he should indeed rejoice in.  Much to the same effect he wrote[310] to his ‘very dear brothers,’ the pastors and professors of Geneva.  The letter related, in the first instance, to the efforts he had been making in behalf of the Piedmontese and Hungarian Churches.  But he took occasion to express the longing desire he felt for union among the Reformed Churches—­a work, he allowed, of difficulty, but which undoubtedly could be achieved, if all were bent on concord.  He hoped he might not be thought trenching upon a province in which he had no concern, if he implored most earnestly both Lutherans and Reformed to be very tolerant and forbearing in the mutual controversies