Yet such criticisms miss the real significance of the theory.

It is really the introduction into English politics of that notion of the two societies which, a century before, Melville and Bellarmine had made so fruitful.

With neither Presbyterian nor Jesuit was the separation complete, for the simple reason that each had a secret conviction that the ecclesiastical society was at bottom the superior.

Yet the theory was the parent of liberty, if only because it pointed the way to a balance of power between claims which, before, had seemed mutually exclusive.
Until the Toleration Act, the theory was worthless to the English Church because its temper, under the aegis of Laudian views, had been in substance theocratic.

But after 1692 it aptly expressed the compromise the dominant party of the Church had then in mind.