Yet the protest remained, and it bore a noble fruit in the next century. The Oxford movement is usually regarded as a return to the seventeenth century, to the ideals, that is to say, of Laud and Andrewes.[13] In fact, its real kinship is with Atterbury and Law. Like them, it was searching the secret of ecclesiastical independence, and like them it discovered that connection with the State means, in the end, the sacrifice of the church to the needs of each political situation. "The State has deserted us," wrote Newman; and the words might have been written of the earlier time. The Oxford movement, indeed, like its predecessor, built upon foundations of sand; and when Lord Brougham told the House of Lords that the idea of the Church possessing "absolute and unalienable rights" was a "gross and monstrous anomaly" because it would make impossible the supremacy of Parliament, he simply announced the result of a doctrine which, implicit in the Act of Submission, was first completely defined by Wake and Hoadly. Nor has the history of this controversy ended. "Thoughtful men," the Archbishop of Canterbury has told the House of Lords,[14] "... see the absolute need, if a Church is to be strong and vigorous, for the Church, _qua_ church, to be able to say what it can do as a church." "The rule of the sovereign, the rule of Parliament," replied Lord Haldane,[15] "extend as far as the rule of the Church. They are not to be distinguished or differentiated, and that was the condition under which ecclesiastical power was transmitted to the Church of England." Today, that is to say, as in the past, antithetic theories of the nature of the State hinge, in essence, upon the problem of its sovereignty. "A free church in a free state," now, as then, may be our ideal; but we still seek the means wherewith to build it. [Footnote 13: Cf. my _Problem of Sovereignty_, Chapter III.] [Footnote 14: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p. 992 (June 3, 1919).] [Footnote 15: _Parliamentary Debates_. Fifth Series, Vol. 34, p 1002. The quotation does not fully represent Lord Haldane's views.] CHAPTER IV THE ERA OF STAGNATION I