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The opposite party, adopting moderation jointly with union as their password, and glorifying it as 'the cement of the world, 'the ornament of human kind, 'the chiefest Christian grace, 'the peculiar characteristic of this Church, would pass on almost in the same breath to pile upon their opponents indiscriminate charges of persecution, priestcraft, superstition, and to inveigh against them as 'a narrow Laudean faction, 'a jealous-headed, unneighbourly, selfish sect of Ishmaelites. Evidently, so long as the spirit of party was thus rampant, any measure of Church comprehension was entirely out of question.
The old Puritanism was almost obsolete; but there were always Low Churchmen, not only in the earlier, but in the modern sense of the word. High Churchmen, in the seventeenth-century and Laudean meaning, were no doubt few and far between by the time the century had run through half its course.
Being fully persuaded," to follow the same writer, "that prelatical ordination and the three orders are indispensable to their profession, they are, like too many of their fellow professors in the mother country, deeply dyed with Laudean principles, or that love of formula in religion and grasping for power which has so conspicuously shown itself among the Oxford tractarians, and which, it is to be feared, is gradually undermining Protestant conformity, by gnawing at its very heart, in the colleges of Great Britain."
And therefore many Churchmen who, if they consulted their feelings only, would have been thoroughly in accord with the Laudean divines in their love of a more ornate ritual, were content to stand fast by such simple ceremonies as were everywhere acknowledged to be the rule.
And Prynne had a double claim on public attention both then and still; for he had been so formidable an antagonist of the Laudean Prelacy, as to have been marked out by Laud as a special victim,—had been condemned to the pillory, and suffered the loss of both his ears by the sentence of that cruel prelate,—and had been rescued from his sufferings, and restored to political life and influence, by the Long Parliament.
Amid all the laxity of the Restoration period amid the partial triumph of Laudean ideas which marked the reign of Queen Anne amid the indifference and sluggishness in religious matters which soon afterwards set in reverence for the sanctity of the Lord's Day, and a fixed purpose that its general character of sedate quietness should not be broken into, grew, though it was but gradually, among almost all classes, into a tradition which was respected even by those who had very little care for other ordinances of religion.
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