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.