ABSTRACT
The Bishop Philpotts of Exeter drew an interesting distinction between the legal and moral sovereignty of Parliament. The Oxford Movement set its face firmly towards the past. It did not desire a charitable breadth of view. For whatever merits Dr. Hampden may have possessed, he represented in the highest possible degree those latitudinarian principles against which the Oxford Movement was the incarnate protest. The Reformation was a Tudor statute carried by violence and upheld by political power; and now that the State is divorcing the Anglican Church, it is dissolving. The evangelism of Knox and Simeon, of Milner and of Wilberforce, had been essentially a protest of spiritual insight against political worldliness. The Oxford group felt that 'the Government's real object was to gratify the priests by the abolition of the hierarchy of the Church of England as a first step to the entire destruction of the Church's status and property, and the formation of a Roman Catholic establishment.
