the control which the Civil Government always must claim over the
Church, by the sudden abstraction of a power which, though usurping, was
spiritual; and presented to the ambition of a despotic King a number of
unwarrantable prerogatives which the separation from the Pope had left
without an owner.

On the trite saying, meant at first to represent, roughly and
invidiously, the effect of the Reformation, and lately urged as
technically and literally true--"The assertion that in the time of
Henry VIII. the See of Rome was both 'the source and centre of
ecclesiastical jurisdiction,' and therefore the supreme judge of
doctrine; and that this power of the Pope was transferred in its
entireness to the Crown"--Mr. Gladstone remarks as follows:--

I will not ask whether the Pope was indeed at that time the
supreme judge of doctrine; it is enough for me that not very long
before the Council of Constance had solemnly said otherwise, in
words which, though they may be forgotten, cannot be annulled....

That the Pope was the source of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the
English Church before the Reformation is an assertion of the
gravest import, which ought not to have been thus taken for
granted.... The fact really is this:--A modern opinion, which, by
force of modern circumstances, has of late gained great favour in
the Church of Rome, is here dated back and fastened upon ages to
whose fixed principles it was unknown and alien; and the case of
the Church of England is truly hard when the Papal authority of
the Middle Ages is exaggerated far beyond its real and historical
scope, with the effect only of fastening that visionary
exaggeration, through the medium of another fictitious notion of