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This prompted the following epitaph on Lord Westbury: Towards the close of his earthly career he dismissed Hell with costs and took away from Orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope of everlasting damnation. This was a great triumph for the Broad Church party, and it is an interesting event in the history of the English State-Church.
This was the logical opening in the Puritan armor, that the Protestant Church-State or State-Church was but a masked and attenuated Catholicism destined to be destroyed by the very principles upon which it had been originally established. If in respect to theory the hanging of the Quakers was a confession, in the realm of practical politics it was but a Pyrrhic victory.
During these years the Civil War was fought; the King executed; the Commonwealth established with its modified state-church, Presbyterian in character. Intolerance was held in check by the power of Cromwell and of the army, for the Independents had made early and successful efforts to win the soldiery to their standard. Philip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 727-820.
But while Englishmen on the whole were pretty well agreed that foreign jurisdiction was to be eliminated, and that Englishmen were to be organized in one body, secular and spiritual, which might be called indifferently a state-church or a church-state, there was much more difference of opinion with regard to its theological complexion.
The more openly the religion of the land was declared a political institution, the more decidedly the political parties regarded the field of the state-church as an arena for attack and defence; which was especially, in a daily-increasing measure, the case with augural science and with the elections to the priestly colleges.
According to this principle of the State-church, all the schools were State-schools. At the present day, Protestant princes and princesses are not looked upon as chief bishops, but the consequence of this objectionable system does still remain, and has gained a foothold even in this free country. The French Revolution, among other things, diffused communistic and socialistic theories.
The time of absolute religious freedom was not yet. As might be expected, numerous modifications of the principles and usages of the papal church occurred in the change from imperial control to the state-church system. This diversity took place in the different countries in accordance either with prevailing conditions and sentiments or with the whims and caprices of the reigning sovereigns.
Such is the sacredness of sport in Europe, where governments audacious enough to attack and overthrow the state-church have never dared to suggest the suppression of the vice by which alone the main form of sport lives ... So that I did not expect to find the United States a very "sporting" country. And I did not so find it.
In June 1792 the Jacobin Club rejected a proposal to abolish the State-Church, and to erect Franklin and Rousseau in the niches occupied by Saints, and in December a member speaking against divine worship met with no support.
Such a revolution did not signalize the disestablishment of a state-church.
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