"William Warburton's Alliance between Church and State was published at the time of greatest strain in 1736. It offered a realistic defence of the position of the Church, one which abandoned all pretensions to an independent authority, and yet laid on the State a clear duty of protection. It was strongly approved by Sherlock and the court. In time it came to be seen as the classic statement of complacent Georgian Erastianism and a mark of the stable relationship between religion and politics in mid-eighteenth-century England."