any rate, it agreed with no other, that it retained an anomalous and decapitated form of Catholicism, and that, in practice, if not in theory too, it owed its doctrine, as well as whatever of discipline it retained, to its lay supreme head.
This was the situation at the end of the reign; but the fact that its establishment coincided, in point of time, with the general rise of Protestantism throughout Europe and its extension into England, complicated it still further. Henry's death took off, in a great degree, the pressure which alone kept the two rival religious parties from flying atone another's throats; but the subjection of the Church to the State still continued, and, as circumstances now threw the power into the hands of the reforming party, the result was a revolution in the doctrines of the Church almost as complete as that which Henry had already brought about in its constitution: indeed, the prevalent idea on the subject at the time, and for long after, appears to have been that suggested in the passage already quoted from Archbishop Bramhall—that of the two great changes of which the Reformation consisted, that in the constitution of the Church was the work of Henry VIII., and that in its doctrine of Edward VI. 's Council. This, in the main, is a true account of the history; but it requires some modification, for Henry did not confine himself so entirely to matters of external constitution as this view suggests, and both these revolutionary changes were for the time entirely swept away by Mary; so that, in point of fact, Elizabeth began her government with a complete tabula rasa in the matter of religion; and the permanent importance of the constitutional changes of Henry's reign, and the doctrinal changes of Edward's, is limited to the degree in which they respectively served
