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: