ABSTRACT
The members of the State were all members of Christ's Church, indeed Church and State were but aspects of the same society, either working in the uneasy partnership that prevailed in medieval Europe, or fused into the more complete unity described by Hooker. Socially, magisterially and intellectually there were factors in the tradition of the Church of England which inevitably committed the clergy to the consideration of the secular social problems of their time, and it may be added that this was the result of their pastoral tradition as well. At the end of the eighteenth century the kind of society which the Church was supposed to guarantee was violently threatened by the French Revolution, and in the early stages of the Revolution there was an assault on the ancient ecclesiastical establishment of France. The hierarchy of government was under the old regime closely integrated with the social order of society.
