Not that this barrenness is without its compensations. The theories of the Revolution had exhausted their fruitfulness within a generation. The constitutional ideas of the seventeenth century had no substance for an England where Anglicanism and agriculture were beginning to lose the rigid outlines of overwhelming predominance. What was needed was the assurance of safety for the Church that her virtue might be tested in the light of nonconformist practice on the one hand, and the new rationalism on the other.