power for the purpose of installing the Pope in her place. Elizabeth's system had been more like her father's, but she had greater difficulties to contend with, and less absolutely submissive implements with which to work. A different state of things existed in Edward's reign, because his youth interfered with his personal action, and consequently the element of party was introduced to an extent otherwise unknown in the Tudor age: but it was essentially a transitory condition, and if it had not been brought to an end by his death, would have been so very little later by his majority; and there is every reason to believe that he would have displayed the Tudor self-will to the full as much as the other members of his house.
It is difficult to study the actual facts of sixteenth-century history, putting apart preconceived ecclesiastical theories, without arriving at the conclusion that the English National Church was as completely the creation of Henry VIII., Edward's Council, and Elizabeth, as Saxon Protestantism was of Luther, or Swiss of Calvin or of Zwingle, Obviously no man who sets forth a distinctive form of Christianity can proclaim himself the founder of a new religion or a new Church as such. So long as the new organisation claims to be Christian at all, it must go back for its foundation to Jesus Christ and His Apostles, and he himself can appear only as a reformer, a restorer of what professes, and must profess, to be the religion which they delivered to mankind. In this particular the claim of the English Reformers of the sixteenth century was the same as that of Luther and Calvin, or of Cartwright and Travers, and the whole question about what is to be recognised as 'primitive' or 'catholic' is one of interpretation and historical theory.
