From this time dates the long struggle between the two great parties of Conformists. These parties, indeed, had, under various forms, existed within the Anglican communion ever since the Reformation; but, till after the Revolution, they were not marshalled in regular and permanent order of battle against each other, and therefore were not known by established names. Now they began to be called the High-Church party and the Low-Church party. The High-Church party sympathised with James, and were cool friends to William, and thought that no man who was an enemy to the ecclesiastical constitution of the realm ought to be permitted to bear any part in the civil government. The Low-Church party stood between the Nonconformists and the rigid Conformists, and contained, as it still contains, two different elements—a Puritan and a Latitudinarian element. They saw nothing in the existing polity and ceremonial of the Church of England which could make it their duty to become Dissenters; but, at the same time, they held that both the polity and ceremonial were means, not ends, and that the essential spirit of Christianity might exist without Episcopal orders, and without a Book of Common Prayer. They had, while James was on the throne, been mainly instrumental in forming the great Protestant coalition against Popery and tyranny, and they continued, in 1689, to hold the same conciliatory language which they had held in 1688. They greatly blamed the scruples of the Nonconformists, but thought the reflections thrown on them by the High-Church party to be grossly unjust.[85] ----- Footnote 85: Macaulay. ----- More than one Methodist historian has said that Samuel Wesley was “a rigid Tory in politics, and a High Churchman in religious principle;” that he “regarded Charles I. as properly a martyr; and was very much attached to the interests of James.” I respectfully doubt, to some extent, the correctness of these assertions. Samuel Wesley was not a Jacobite, and, in the first instance, he was not a Tory. There is no evidence to show that he was attached to the interests of James; but, on the contrary, he was disgusted with James’s tyranny at Oxford, and was the author of the first pamphlet published in defence of the Revolution. John Wesley says, his father was a Tory, in the sense of being “one that believes God, not the people, to be the origin of all civil power;”[86] but he likewise asserts, that his “father always praised God for the happy revolution of 1688.”[87] ----- Footnote 86: Wesley’s _Works_, vol. xiv., p. 342. Footnote 87: _Gent. Mag._, 1785, p. 247. -----