departing soul by an absolution which breathes the very spirit of
the old religion. In general it may be said that she appeals more
to the understanding , and less to the senses and the
imagination, than the Church of Rome, and that she appeals less
to the understanding, and more to the senses and imagination,
than the Protestant Churches of Scotland, France, and
Switzerland.

Nothing, however, so strongly distinguished the Church of England
from other Churches as the relation in which she stood to the
monarchy. The King was her head. The limits of the authority
which he possessed, as such, were not traced, and indeed have
never yet been traced with precision. The laws which declared
him supreme in ecclesiastical matters were drawn rudely and in
general terms. If, for the purpose of ascertaining the sense of
those laws, we examine the books and lives of those who founded
the English Church, our perplexity will be increased. For the
founders of the English Church wrote and acted in an age of
violent intellectual fermentation, and of constant action and
reaction. They therefore often contradicted each other and
sometimes contradicted themselves. That the King was, under
Christ, sole head of the Church was a doctrine which they all
with one voice affirmed: but those words had very different
significations in different mouths, and in the same mouth at
different conjunctures. Sometimes an authority which would have
satisfied Hildebrand was ascribed to the sovereign: then it
dwindled down to an authority little more than that which had
been claimed by many ancient English princes who had been in
constant communion with the Church of Rome. What Henry and his
favourite counsellors meant, at one time, by the supremacy, was