as a set-off against the Puritan claim of Divine right for their discipline that this counter-claim was made.
It may perhaps be said that some of these conclusions appertain to Church history exclusively and not to a history of the relations of Church and State. The reply is that, whatever may have happened later, up to the time with which we are now dealing, the distinction is trivial. From the time of Henry VIII.'s Acts of Supremacy and of Submission of the Clergy, the Church of England was, as its whole history shows, simply a department of the State. If, during that time, we wish to follow the history of an independent ecclesiastical organisation, we must look for it either in the proscribed Church of Rome, or among the unlicensed and persecuted Nonconformist sects. Anabaptists or other. It may further be objected that, in presenting this view, I have omitted many facts which seem to point in an opposite direction, such as the importance which has been attached in certain cases to the decisions of Convocation, the solemn form and language in which they have been framed, and the vast amount of learning and research which has been expended on the question of whether this, that, or the other important ecclesiastical act or document has or has not the authority of Convocation.
To this the answer is, that it has been a habit of governments generally to recommend every new ordinance by alleging every conceivable warrant in its defence, and that this habit never prevailed to a greater extent than in the Tudor age, when the civil government had taken upon itself a new set of functions, which it was endeavouring by every possible means to persuade men were but the natural developments of old ones, and consequently, wherever it could obtain, by whatever process of coercion, a colourable sanction
