declare her doctrine, or should be employed in administering her laws.  What she did concede was, not original powers of direction and guidance, but powers of restraint and correction;—­under securities greater, both in form and in working, than those possessed at the time by any other body in England, for their rights and liberties—­greater far than might have been expected, when the consequences of a long foreign supremacy—­not righteously maintained and exercised, because at the moment unrighteously thrown off—­increased the control which the Civil Government always must claim over the Church, by the sudden abstraction of a power which, though usurping, was spiritual; and presented to the ambition of a despotic King a number of unwarrantable prerogatives which the separation from the Pope had left without an owner.

On the trite saying, meant at first to represent, roughly and invidiously, the effect of the Reformation, and lately urged as technically and literally true—­“The assertion that in the time of Henry VIII. the See of Rome was both ’the source and centre of ecclesiastical jurisdiction,’ and therefore the supreme judge of doctrine; and that this power of the Pope was transferred in its entireness to the Crown”—­Mr. Gladstone remarks as follows:—­

I will not ask whether the Pope was indeed at that time the supreme judge of doctrine; it is enough for me that not very long before the Council of Constance had solemnly said otherwise, in words which, though they may be forgotten, cannot be annulled....

That the Pope was the source of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the English Church before the Reformation is an assertion of the gravest import, which ought not to have been thus taken for granted....  The fact really is this:—­A modern opinion, which, by force of modern circumstances, has of late gained great favour in the Church of Rome, is here dated back and fastened upon ages to whose fixed principles it was unknown and alien; and the case of the Church of England is truly hard when the Papal authority of the Middle Ages is exaggerated far beyond its real and historical scope, with the effect only of fastening that visionary exaggeration, through the medium of another fictitious notion of wholesale transfer of the Papal privileges to the Crown, upon us, as the true and legal measure of the Royal Supremacy.

It appears to me that he who alleges in the gross that the Papal prerogatives were carried over to the Crown at the Reformation, greatly belies the laws and the people of that era.  Their unvarying doctrine was, that they were restoring the ancient regal jurisdiction, and abolishing one that had been usurped.  But there is no evidence to show that these were identical in themselves, or co-extensive in their range.  In some respects the Crown obtained at that period more than the Pope had ever had; for I am not aware that the Convocation required his license to deliberate upon