the other. This sermon of Bancroft's has attained to a fame out of all proportion to its intrinsic merits. It owes its immortality to the fact that in it for the first time, more than half a century after the separation from Rome, the above doctrine is maintained. It is put forward in a mild and scarcely more than suggestive tone, and to a modern reader appears scarcely noticeable as compared with the blast of unqualified asseveration with which the royal supremacy is asserted in its most unmitigated form; the preacher maintaining, almost in the words of Henry VIII.'s Act of Supremacy, that 'not only the title of supreme governor over all persons and in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as civil, did appertain and ought to be annexed to the Crown, but likewise all honours, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdiction, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits and commodities, which by usurpation at any time did appertain to the Pope.'[1] Nevertheless, at the time when the sermon was preached, and for many years afterwards, it was the former and not the latter assertion which excited attention; because, while the latter was a mere every-day doctrine, with which mankind had been familiar since Cromwell's time, the former, at the time entirely novel, was a desertion of the ground hitherto held by Jewell, Whitgift, and Hooker, and appeared to have been enunciated simply, as one may say, in order to overtrump Cartwright's trick. A similar doctrine was, however, shortly after maintained in a much more serious work by Dr. Bilson, at that time Warden of Winchester College, and subsequently Bishop of Winchester. His treatise on the 'Perpetual Government of Christ's Church' is a careful and well-reasoned work, but the arguments, though familiar in
- ↑ Perry, vol. i. pp. 16, 19.
