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382 YORK.
on ecclesiastical doctrine and discipline.
Rigid conformity
to rubric and canon, even to the minutest
particular, was what both the primates longed to
obtain in their respective provinces. " Unity," said
Laud, "cannot long continue in the Church when
Uniformity is shut out of the Church door." To
establish the latter was their great ambition, but the
stern application of the rod of discipline was their
only inodus operandi. They brought men into the
High Commission Court and into the Bishops' Courts,
they suspended and they excommunicated. That no
small debt of gratitude is due to the great divines of
the seventeenth century, of whom Laud was unquestionably
one of the most prominent, though not
the most lovable, is indubitable. To them we owe
the preservation of a sounder system of theology and
the maintenance of a more seemly ceremonial than
sectarian narrowness and prejudice would have allowed
to be perpetuated ; but they inherited the evil traditions
of the Tudor era as regarded their mode of
working. They failed to see that "it is not the
mother's learning, but the mother's love and tenderness
which educate and nourish the child ; so it is
the love and pastoral care of the Church, and not her
theology and learning, that will find their way home
to the hearts of any religious community." They
were too short-sighted, moreover, to recognise that a
great middle class was day by day rising up around
them into increased importance and prominence in
the country, and exhibiting intellectual quahfications
of no mean order,—a class which could not brook
the arbitrary mode of action which was unhappily
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