Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/284

and how, though possibly more than half the country was converted from an independent source, yet the whole deliberately submitted to the Roman Primacy, and from thenceforth became one with itself and with the rest of the Western Church: how the Norman conquest did but cement the union by eliminating much that was Saxon and insular in the law and the practice of the Church courts: and how the Papal power and influence, instead of being less in England than elsewhere, was in reality greater; and this not only in the times of Pope Innocent and King John, but generally throughout the whole period extending down to Henry VII. himself. It may serve also to place us on our guard against that peculiar second intention in which the word national is commonly used by English ecclesiastical historians, writing either with the general object of magnifying and glorifying everything English as such, or with the more specific intention of making out what they consider a more satisfactory pedigree for the modern English Church establishment. To an unsophisticated reader it might appear that the phrase National Church must at least imply the previous existence of a nation and a Church in the country of which it is used. Yet in the very last book which has been published on the subject^[1] we find ourselves called upon to admire the specially national character of the English Church, at a time when there existed in England at least two Churches and no nation at all. Much has been made in this relation of the fact—or the alleged fact—already referred to, that a larger portion of England was converted by Scoto-Irish missionaries than by Roman. This appears difficult to

1. The English Church in the Middle Ages, by W. Hunt, in Prof. Creighton's Epochs of Church History.