pedigree, not as upholders of nearly obsolete opinions about divine right and passive obedience, but as the main link between the High Churchmen of a previous age and their successors at a much later period.  To the revivers in this century of the Anglo-Catholic theology, it seemed as though the direct succession of sound English divines ended with Bull and Beveridge, was partially continued, as by a side line, in some of the Nonjurors, and then dwindled and almost died out, until after the lapse of a hundred years its vitality was again renewed.

On points of doctrine and discipline the early Nonjurors differed in nothing from the High Churchmen whose communion they had deserted.  Some of them called themselves, it is true, ‘the old Church of England,’ ’the Catholic and faithful remnant’ which alone adhered to ’the orthodox and rightful bishops,’ and bitter charges, mounting up to that of apostacy, were directed against the ‘compliant’ majority.  But, wide as was the gulf, and heinous as was the sin by which, according to such Nonjurors, the Established Church had separated itself from primitive faith, the asserted defection consisted solely in this, that it had committed the sin of rebellion in forsaking its divinely appointed King, and the sin of schism in rejecting the authority of its canonical bishops.  No one contended that there were further points of difference between the two communions.  Dr. Bowes asked Blackburn, one of their bishops, whether ’he was so happy as to belong to his diocese?’ ‘Dear friend,’ was the answer, ’we leave the sees open that the gentlemen who now unjustly possess them, upon the restoration, may, if they please, return to their duty and be continued.  We content ourselves with full episcopal power as suffragans.’  The introduction, however, in 1716, of the distinctive ‘usages’ in the communion service contributed greatly to the farther estrangement of a large section of the Nonjurors; and those who adopted the new Prayer-book drawn up in 1734 by Bishop Deacon, were alienated still more.  The only communion with which they claimed near relationship was one which in their opinion had long ceased to exist.  ’I am not of your communion,’ said Bishop Welton on his death-bed, in 1726, to the English Chaplain at Lisbon, whose services he declined.  ’I belong to the Church of England as it was reformed by Archbishop Cranmer.’[111] Thus too, when Bishop Deacon’s son, a youth of little more than twenty, suffered execution for his share in the Jacobite rising of 1745, his last words upon the scaffold were that he died ’a member not of the Church of Rome, nor yet of that of England, but of a pure Episcopal Church, which has reformed all the errors, corruptions, and defects that have been introduced into the modern Churches of Christendom.’[112] Yet the divergence of these Nonjurors from the National Church was, after all, far more apparent than real.  It was only a very small minority, beginning with Deacon and Campbell,