simple matter than that of the army or the navy, and affects the general welfare much more widely, it is right that the ultimate appeal should be to a tribunal representing the nation. If it be asked how the laws which govern the organization for public worship should be framed, the answer is that the constitutional course is that such legislation should be prepared by a Royal Commission, on which lawyers and other laymen as well as clergymen should serve, but that the laws themselves should be passed, as Hooker says, by the national organs alone1; and for this, though the advice of the clergy may rightly be asked, as the advice of the college of physicians for a medical Act, yet their consent is not indispensable. If it be asked, further, how the details of ritual and of parochial organization should be decided, the answer is that in the original settlement such matters were partly laid down by the central acts of uniformity, that a strong visitorial power was held to reside in the Bishops, as is shewn in the visitation of Ridley in London in 15502, which has gradually been extinguished; and that all things not settled by these means were left to the discretion. of the individual clergyman; but that the analogy of other departments would point out as the true policy the gradual relaxation of uniformity, and the relegation of such matters to local discretion, and the calling forth of lay interest and lay power in the localities.

1 See Note XIX.

2 Injunctions given in the visitation of the reverend father in God, Nicholas, bishop of London, for an uniformity in his Diocese of London, in the fourth year of our Sovereign Lord King Edward the VIth, A.D. 1550,' in Cardwell's Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England,' i. 81.

If, further, a question be raised as to the legitimacy of the Royal Supremacy from the fact that, through the progress of the national development, it is no longer the Sovereign who is supreme, but the Prime Minister and the Parliament, the answer is that the laws of the Reformation era were themselves framed by Parliament, and that Parliament then represented a nation in which far less unity of sentiment prevailed in such matters as were then dealt with than in the England of our own day; that the Sovereign had power as representing the nation, and that the Prime Minister and the Parliament of our day represent the nation more fully; and that it accords better with the genius of Christianity that these matters should be determined by the great Christian brotherhood as a whole through its representatives than by the individual Sovereign. And if, further, it be objected that neither the electors nor the elected are all of them Christians, much less all of them worshippers according to the Act of Uniformity, the answer is that in all such matters we must take the general sense of the community, not looking minutely at exceptions, and that experience shews that the more the community is trusted as a Christian body, the more it will prove itself capable of acting unitedly as such, and will grow into its full capacities as a branch of the Christian Church.

We must trace, by reviewing the salient facts of English history during the last three centuries and a half, how far this ideal of the national supremacy and Christian unity has been preserved, how far abandoned or ignored.

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In the time of Henry himself the system was fully maintained. It was furthered by the masterful spirit of the King, though at times marred by his violence. But the redeeming feature of Henry's rule, as afterwards of Edward's and Elizabeth's, was that on the whole it was in harmony with the general conviction of the nation. His changes of mood and action reflected for the most part those of the people. Acts like the abolition of the Papal Jurisdiction, the Suppression of the Monasteries, the Laws of Appeals, and the placing of the Bible in the churches, were acts of the Church, however they may have been regarded by the clergy. If the Act of the Six Articles represents one of those reactionary impulses to which the English nation has always been liable, on the other hand, the feelings of the nation were consulted when, in the end of Henry's reign, the services were translated and a beginning was made of an English Liturgy. The Litany remains to us in the form in which he himself, with Cranmer's assistance, cast it, a monument of the combined political and religious movement. In it the king and the clergy, the lords of the council, the magistrates, and all orders and degrees of men stand side by side as the object of our prayers, constituting in their unity a branch of the Catholic Church; and the national well-being and political justice are recognised as amongst the primary objects for which the Church exists.

In the reign of Edward the problem of the national and ecclesiastical unity was simplified by the fact that the convictions of the young monarch were in

accordance with those of the ecclesiastical leaders, and that the bishops were in harmony with the reforming movement which had now become popular. There were indeed two dangers, the one that through the covetousness and indolence of statesmen the reformation movement might be turned into a channel of mere destructiveness, the other that the ecclesiastical influences about the young King might lay the foundation of a new clericalism. Both were on the whole avoided. The secularization of ecclesiastical estates, so far as it had gone, was ratified; but the wastefulness and violence of men like Admiral Seymour was checked, and Northumberland's misrule, had Edward lived, would have been soon suppressed. The Articles of Religion were sanctioned as a general statement of the beliefs on which the English Reformation had proceeded, reflecting its moderation, not to say its compromises and its hesitancies; the Second Prayerbook also was accepted, though with evident reluctance, and a clear indication of unwillingness to enact changes of the system of worship beyond what was absolutely required1. But the book of reformed ecclesiastical

1 See the words of the Preamble of the Act, 6 Edw. VI, c. 1: 'Where there hath been a very godly order set forth by the Authority of Parliament for Common Prayer, &c. ... within this Church of England, agreeable to the Word of God and the primitive church, very comfortable to all good people. . . . And whereas there hath risen in the use and exercise of the aforesaid Common Service in the Church, heretofore set forth, divers doubts for the fashion and manner of the administrations of the same, rather by the curiosity of the minister and mistakers than of any other worthy cause, therefore as well for the more plain and manifest explanation thereof as for the more perfection of the said order or Common Service, in some places where it is necessary to make the same prayer and fashion of service more earnest and fit to stir Christian people to the true honouring of Almighty God; be it enacted,' &c.

laws, which would have imposed abstract theological statements and minute and puerile directions upon the country as laws, and would have restored a clerical tribunal for ecclesiastical appeals, was put aside as savouring too much of clericalism 1.

We may pass over the reign of Mary as one of mere reaction and confusion, which yet was of service as a testing time. Unhappily, there is a tendency, after revolutionary proceedings like those of Mary's reign, to rebuild too hastily all that has existed before.

The

But the long and glorious reign of Elizabeth was one in which the value residing in the united action of the whole Commonwealth for furthering its healthy development was fully tested and confirmed. Queen had, indeed, far too little faith in liberty, and watched with jealousy instead of sympathy the growth of Protestant conviction, which in the next generation carried all before it. But the toleration which she exercised was great and many-sided. The fault of her administration lay in her determination to keep ecclesiastical affairs under her personal control, instead of allowing the system to be freely moulded by the

1 The final draught of the Reformatio Legum was made by Cranmer and Peter Martyr, their six colleagues lending apparently but little assistance. The first section repeats in several parts the doctrinal statements of the Thirty-Nine Articles, sometimes, as in those about Predestination, making them more stringent. As an instance of the unreal character of these proposed laws, we may take the section on Idolatry, in which 'Pestiferæ artes' are condemned and 'Gravissimæ pœnæ ' are denounced against them, but without any specification of the penalty; or the section on Marriage, in which is a proposed law headed, ⚫ Ut matres propriis uberibus infantes alant.' The proposal as to appeals to the Crown is that they should be decided, in extreme cases, by the provincial Synod, that is, the Convocation; otherwise by three or four bishops appointed for the particular suit by the Crown. It is evident these proposals were unfit to pass into law.