Notes and Queries, Number 197, August 6, 1853 | Page 2

from the unjust Imputation of being No
Churchmen, in Answer to a Pamphlet called "The Distinction of High
and Low Church considered:" Lond. 1706, 8vo. Dr. Sacheverell's trial

gave additional zest to the dudgeon ecclesiastick, and produced a
shower of pamphlets. I give the title of one of them: Pulpit War, or Dr.
S----l, the High Church Trumpet, and Mr. H----ly, the Low Church
Drum, engaged by way of Dialogue, Lond. 1710, 8vo.
To understand the cause of the exceeding bitterness and virulence
which animated the parties denominated High Church and Low Church,
we must remember that until the time of William of Orange, the
Church of England, as a body--her sovereigns and bishops, her clergy
and laity--comes under the former designation; while those who
sympathised with the Dissenters were comparatively few and weak. As
soon as William was head of the Church, he opened the floodgates of
Puritanism, and admitted into the church what previously had been
more or less external to it. This element, thus made part and parcel of
the Anglican Church, was denominated Low Church. William
supplanted the bishops and clergy who refused to take oaths of
allegiance to him as king de jure; and by putting Puritans in their place,
made the latter the dominant party. Add to this the feelings of
exasperation produced by the murder of Charles I., and the expulsion of
the Stuarts, and we have sufficient grounds, political and religious, for
an irreconcilable feud. Add, again, the reaction resulting from the
overthrow of the tyrannous hot-bed and forcing-system, where a sham
conformity was maintained by coercion; and the Church-Papist, as well
as the Church-Puritans, with ill-concealed hankering after the mass and
the preaching-house, by penal statutes were forced to do what their
souls abhorred, and play the painful farce of attending the services of
"The Establishment."
A writer in a High Church periodical of 1717 (prefacing his article with
the passage from Proverbs vi. 27.) proceeds:
"The old way of attacking the Church of England was by mobs and
bullies, and hard sounds; by calling Whore, and Babylon, upon our
worship and liturgy, and kicking out our clergy as dumb dogs: but now
they have other irons in the fire; a new engine is set up under the cloak
and disguise of temper, unity, comprehension, and the Protestant
religion. Their business now is not to storm the Church, but to lull it to

sleep: to make us relax our care, quit our defences, and neglect our
safety.... These are the politics of their Popish fathers: when they had
tried all other artifices, they at last resolved to sow schism and division
in the Church: and from thence sprang up this very generation, who by
a fine stratagem endeavoured to set us one against the other, and they
gather up the stakes. Hence the distinction of High and Low
Church."--The Scourge, p. 251.
In another periodical of the same date, in the Dedication "To the most
famous University of Oxford," the writer says:
"These enemies of our religious and civil establishment have
represented you as instillers of slavish doctrines and principles ... if to
give to God and Cæsar his due be such tow'ring, and High Church
principles, I am sure St. Peter and St. Paul will scarce escape being
censured for Tories and Highflyers."--The Entertainer, Lond. 1717.
"If those who have kept their first love, and whose robes have not been
defiled, endeavour to stop these innovations and corruptions that their
enemies would introduce, they are blackened for High Church Papists,
favourers of I know not who, and fall under the public resentment."--Ib.
p. 301.
I shall now give a few extracts from Low Church writers (quoted in The
Scourge), who thus designate their opponents:
"A pack or party of scandalous, wicked, and profane men, who
appropriate to themselves the name of High Church (but may more
properly be said to be Jesuits or Papists in masquerade), do take liberty
to teach, preach, and print, publickly and privately, sedition,
contentions, and divisions among the Protestants of this
kingdom."--Motives to Union, p. 1.
"These men glory in their being members of the High Church (Popish
appellation, and therefore they are the more fond of that); but these
pretended sons are become her persecutors, and they exercise their spite
and lies both on the living and the dead."--The Snake in the Grass
brought to Light, p. 8.

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"Our common people of the High Church are as ignorant in matters of
religion as the bigotted Papists, which gives great advantage to our
Jacobite and Tory priests to lead them where they please, or to mould
them into what shapes they please."--Reasons for an Union, p. 39.
"The minds of the populace are too much debauched already from their
loyalty by seditious arts of the High Church