If you allege that the Church has a spiritual authority to regulate doctrines and discipline, still, as you choose to back that authority with the force of temporal law, and as the State is exclusively responsible for the use of that force, you must be content to fold up the authority of the Church in that exterior form through which you desire it to take effect.  From whatsoever source it may come originally, it comes to the subject as law; it therefore comes to him from the fountain of law....  The faith of Christendom has been received in England; the discipline of the Christian Church, cast into its local form, modified by statutes of the realm, and by the common law and prerogative, has from time immemorial been received in England; but we can view them only as law, although you may look further back to the divine and spiritual sanction, in virtue of which they acquired that social position, which made it expedient that they should associate with law and should therefore become law.

But as to the doctrine itself, it is most obvious to notice that it is not more strange, and not necessarily more literally real, than those other legal views of royal prerogative and perfection, which are the received theory of all our great jurists—­accepted by them for very good reasons, but not the less astounding when presented as naked and independent truths.  It was natural enough that they should claim for the Crown the origination of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, considering what else they claimed for it.  Mr. Allen can present us with a more than Chinese idea of royal power, when he draws it only from Blackstone:—­

They may have heard [he says, speaking of the “unlearned in the law”] that the law of England is founded in reason and wisdom.  The first lesson they are taught will inform them, that the law of England attributes to the King absolute perfection, absolute immortality, and legal ubiquity.  They will be told that the King of England is not only incapable of doing wrong, but of thinking wrong.  They will be informed that he never dies, that he is invisible as well as immortal, and that in the eye of the law he is present at one and the same instant in every court of justice within his dominions....  They may have been told that the royal prerogative in England is limited; but when they consult the sages of the law, they will be assured that the legal authority of the King of England is absolute and irresistible ... that all are under him, while he is under none but God....

If they have had the benefit of a liberal education, they have been taught that to obtain security for persons and property was the great end for which men submitted to the restraints of civil government; and they may have heard of the indispensable necessity of an independent magistracy for the due administration of justice; but when they direct their inquiries to the laws and constitution of England, they will find it an established maxim in