canons, or his assent to their promulgation.  In other respects the Crown acquired less; for not the Crown, but the Archbishop of Canterbury was appointed to exercise the power of dispensation in things lawful, and to confirm Episcopal elections.  Neither the Crown nor the Archbishop succeeded to such Papal prerogatives as were contrary to the law of the land; for neither the 26th of Henry VIII. nor the 2nd of Elizabeth annexed to the Crown all the powers of correction and reformation which had been actually claimed by the Pope, but only such as “hath heretofore been or may lawfully be exercised or used.” ...  The “ancient jurisdiction,” and not the then recently claimed or exercised powers, was the measure and the substance of what the Crown received from the Legislature; and, with those ancient rights for his rule, no impartial man would say that the Crown was the source of ecclesiastical jurisdiction according to the statutes of the Reformation.  But the statutes of the Reformation era relating to jurisdiction, having as statutes the assent of the laity, and accepted by the canons of the clergy, are the standard to which the Church has bound herself as a religious society to conform.

The word “jurisdiction” has played an important part in the recent discussions; whether its meaning, with its various involved and associated ideas, by no means free from intricacy and confusion, have been duly unravelled and made clear, we may be permitted to doubt.  A distinction of the canonists has been assumed by those who have used the word with most precision—­assumed, though it is by no means a simple and indisputable one.  Mr. Gladstone draws attention to this, when, after noticing that nowhere in the ecclesiastical legislation of Elizabeth is the claim made on behalf of the Crown to be the source of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, he admits that this is the language of the school of English law, and offers an explanation of the fact.  That which Acts of Parliament do not say, which is negatived in actual practice by contradictory and irreconcilable facts, is yet wanted by lawyers for the theoretic completeness of their idea and system of law.  The fact is important as a reminder that what is one real aspect, or, perhaps, the most complete and consistent representation of a system on paper, may be inadequate and untrue as an exhibition of its real working and appearance in the world.

To sum up the whole, then, I contend that the Crown did not claim by statute, either to be of right, or to become by convention, the source of that kind of action, which was committed by the Saviour to the Apostolic Church, whether for the enactment of laws, or for the administration of its discipline; but the claim was, that all the canons of the Church, and all its judicial proceedings, inasmuch as they were to form parts respectively of the laws and of the legal administration of justice in the kingdom, should run only with the assent