ABSTRACT
Ritualism even threatened the continued existence of the national Church. For if ritualists succeeded in impressing their stamp on public worship in the established Church, it would be repugnant to the dominant religious sentiments in England, and Parliament might very well cut it adrift. Hatred of popery and suspicion of anything redolent of it had been burned into the country's soul by the double threat, alive from the Reformation into the eighteenth century, of external attack by foreign Roman Catholic powers and internal subversion by British Roman Catholics. Protestantism had been the religious counterpart of nationalism in England and was coupled with the victory of Parliament over the Stuarts. The government provided High Churchmen with a golden opportunity to get rid of the bishops in 1873. Lord Selborne, the Lord Chancellor, introduced the Supreme Court of Judicature Bill under which the whole structure of the judiciary was to be recast.
