has encroached on the province of the spirit uality, it was by this statute that the first step in that direction was taken. The court of delegates was as much a civil statutory tribunal as the judicial committee, and no one who accepts the legislation of 1533 as constitutional will find it easy to explain to himself and other people wherein it differed in principle from that of 1833, when the functions of the court of delegates were transferred to the privy council. In 1534 the Royal Supremacy was again defined by a statute (26 Hen. VIII, c. 1 ), in which the King is spoken of as " the supreme head of the Church of England." This act was re pealed by a statute of Philip and Mary ( 1 and 2 Ph. and M. c. 8), which was in turn repealed by an act of Elizabeth declaring That all foreign power and authority, spiritual and temporal, should be extinguished and that such jurisdictions, privileges, superiorities, preemin ences, spiritual and ecclesiastical, as by any spiritual or ecclesiastical power or authority have heretofore been or may lawfully be exereised or used for visitation of the ecclesiastical state and persons . . . shall for ever by authority of this present parliament be united and annexed to the Imperial crown of this realm. It is tolerably clear from these words what the constitutional limits of the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy were intended to be. But the matter was placed beyond all doubt by the explanation given in the injunctions of 1559 of the oath of supremacy :,— The Queen neither did nor ever would chal lenge any authority other than was challenged and lately used by the king, her father and brother, which is and 7vas of aneient lime, due to the Im perial crown of this realm, that is, that the Queen shall have sovereignty and rule over all manner of persons of what estate ecclesiastical or tem
poral, so as no other foreign power shall have authoritv over them. A later statute (5 Elizabeth, s. 14) refers to this explanation as fixing the legal con struction of the oath of supremacy and limit ing the obligation contracted by it. The same limited theory was adopted in the can ons of 1603 (1 R. 2) and in the thirty-nine articles (Art. 37). To sum up briefly the re sults of the foregoing observations, what the doctrine of the Royal Supremacy does not involve is plain enough. It does not involve — on the contrary it repudiates — any claim on the part of the sovereign or the state to affect the creed or the orders of the church otherwise than by adding certain legal sanc tions to what the church had from the beginning received. But what docs it in volve on the positive side, in the w:ay of either legislation or jurisdiction? Is there a conflict between the express reservation of the rights of the Eeelesia Anglieana in Magna Charta — a reservation emphasized, it should be noticed, by the declaration in the Reformation legislation that the determi nation of questions in any cause of the law divine belongs to the spirituality, " without the intermeddling of any exterior person," and also by a similar provision in the articles — and such statutes as the act of submis sion, and the Judicial Committee, Act 1832, not to speak of that stormy petrel of ecclesi astical controversy, the Public Worship Regulation act of 1874? This is a legal problem still unsolved. To all appearance, the time for its solution is approaching. It would be of inestimable advantage to the church, if different schools of thought could agree to discuss it, without recourse to epithets of " Erastianism " on the one side and " Rebellion " on the other.
