declares, in terms as emphatic, that the ministering of God's
word does not belong to princes. The Queen, however, still had
over the Church a visitatorial power of vast and undefined
extent. She was entrusted by Parliament with the office of
restraining and punishing heresy and every sort of ecclesiastical
abuse, and was permitted to delegate her authority to
commissioners. The Bishops were little more than her ministers.
Rather than grant to the civil magistrate the absolute power of
nominating spiritual pastors, the Church of Rome, in the eleventh
century, set all Europe on fire. Rather than grant to the civil
magistrate the absolute power of nominating spiritual pastors,
the ministers of the Church of Scotland, in our time, resigned
their livings by hundreds. The Church of England had no such
scruples. By the royal authority alone her prelates were
appointed. By the royal authority alone her Convocations were
summoned, regulated, prorogued, and dissolved. Without the royal
sanction her canons had no force. One of the articles of her
faith was that without the royal consent no ecclesiastical
council could lawfully assemble. From all her judicatures an
appeal lay, in the last resort, to the sovereign, even when the
question was whether an opinion ought to be accounted heretical,
or whether the administration of a sacrament had been valid. Nor
did the Church grudge this extensive power to our princes. By
them she had been called into existence, nursed through a feeble
infancy, guarded from Papists on one side and from Puritans on
the other, protected against Parliaments which bore her no good
will, and avenged on literary assailants whom she found it hard
to answer. Thus gratitude, hope, fear, common attachments, common
enmities, bound her to the throne. All her traditions, all her
tastes, were monarchical. Loyalty became a point of professional