that country that all jurisdiction emanates from the Crown.  They will be told that the King is not ony the chief, but the sole magistrate of the nation; and that all others act by his commission, and in subordination to him.[2]

  [2]
  Allen on the Royal Prerogative, pp. 1-3.

“In the most limited monarchy,” as he says truly the “King is represented in law books, as in theory an absolute sovereign.”  “Even now,” says Mr. Gladstone, “after three centuries of progress toward democratic sway, the Crown has prerogatives by acting upon which, within their strict and unquestioned bounds, it might at any time throw the country into confusion.  And so has each House of Parliament.”  But if the absolute supremacy of the Crown in the legal point of mew exactly the same over temporal matters and causes as over spiritual, is taken by no sane man to be a literal fact in temporal matters, it is violating the analogy of the Constitution, and dealing with the most important subjects in a mere spirit of narrow perverseness, to insist that it can have none but a literal meaning in ecclesiastical matters; and that the Church did mean, though the State did not to accept a despotic prerogative, unbounded by custom, convention, or law, and unchecked by acknowledged and active powers in herself.  Yet such is the assumption, made in bitterness and vexation of spirit by some of those who have lately so hastily given up her cause; made with singular assurance by others, who, Liberals in all their political doctrines, have, for want of better arguments, invoked prerogative against the Church.

What the securities and checks were that the Church, not less than the nation, contemplated and possessed, are not expressed in the theory itself of the royal prerogative; and, as in the ease of the nation, we might presume beforehand, that they would be found in practice rather than on paper.  They were, however, real ones.  “With the same theoretical laxity and practical security,” as in the case of Parliaments and temporal judges, “was provision made for the conduct of Church affairs.”  Making allowance for the never absent disturbances arising out of political trouble and of personal character, the Church had very important means of making her own power felt in the administration of her laws, as well as in the making of them.

The real question, I apprehend, is this:—­When the Church assented to those great concessions which were embodied in our permanent law at the Reformation, had she adequate securities that the powers so conveyed would be exercised, upon the whole, with a due regard to the integrity of her faith, and of her office, which was and has ever been a part of that faith?  I do not ask whether these securities were all on parchment or not—­whether they were written or unwritten—­whether they were in statute, or in common law, or in fixed usage, or in the spirit of the Constitution and in the habits of