Amidst the confusion of the period hope dawned upon the persecuted Episcopalians.
Whether or not influenced by the death of Cromwell, and the foresight of coming changes favourable to his own Church, Henry Thorndike, the able Episcopalian scholar and divine, published in 1659 what he called _An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England_; a book which, an admiring critic says, proved to be in spirit a prologue to the renewed life of a Church more vigorous than ever! The aim of the work is to promote the welfare of the Episcopal Church of England, not by any compromise, but by endeavouring to persuade all to unite together on her behalf. Looking at the claims of the Romish Church to immediate inspiration (placed no matter where), and to the equally groundless and more arrogant claims of the fanatics--as Thorndike terms them--to individual inspiration, he urges that each party should be brought to admit themselves limited to the sense of Scripture as expounded by the primitive laws and faith of the Church. Thus, he says, the ground of their errors is cut away. With this imaginary solution of the difficulty, which begs the question, this calculation upon what is impossible, and this triumphant assurance of a conclusion based on premises, which neither Papist nor Puritan would admit--the high, but honest Churchman, shows how much he sympathized with the one and how little with the other.
He expressly avows his approval of prayers for the dead, of the invocation of the Spirit on the elements of the Eucharist, and of the practice of penance; whilst he contends for Episcopacy in the Anglican sense, and wishes to see Presbyters restored to their ancient position of a council to be consulted by the bishop. Thorndike's notion was, in prospect of its restoration, to reform his own Church, by bringing it back to what he considered primitive usage. Those who most condemn some of the views which he advocated will be constrained, on reading his life and works, to acknowledge the guileless simplicity of his character, as apparent in this very publication at such a crisis. He says himself--"That I should publish the result of my thoughts to the world may seem to fall under the historian's censure. '_Frustra autem niti, neque aliud se fatigando, nisi odium quærere, extremæ dementiæ est._'" He adds, "If I be like a man with an arrow in his thigh, or like a woman ready to bring forth,--that is, as Ecclesiasticus saith, like a fool that cannot hold what is in his heart--I am in this, I hope, no fool of Solomon's, but with St. Paul, 'a fool for Christ's sake.'"[39]