Occasional Papers | Page 2

the negative, and so to answer them in conformity with what I understand to be the principles of our history and law. My endeavour will be to show that the powers of the State so determined, in regard to the legislative office of the Church (setting aside for the moment any question as to the right of assent in the laity), are powers of restraint; that the jurisdictions united and annexed to the Crown are corrective jurisdictions; and that their exercise is subject to the general maxim, that the laws ecclesiastical are to be administered by ecclesiastical judges.
Mr. Gladstone first goes into the question--What was done, and what was the understanding at the Reformation? All agree that this was a time of great changes, and that in the settlement resulting from them the State took, and the Church yielded, a great deal. And on the strength of this broad general fact, the details of the settlement have been treated with an a priori boldness, not deficient often in that kind of precision which can be gained by totally putting aside inconvenient or perplexing elements, and having both its intellectual and moral recommendations to many minds; but highly undesirable where a great issue has been raised for the religion of millions, and the political constitution of a great nation. Men who are not lawyers seem to have thought that, by taking a lawyer's view, or what they considered such, of the Reformation Acts, they had disposed of the question for ever. It was, indeed, time for a statesman to step in, and protest, if only in the name of constitutional and political philosophy, against so narrow and unreal an abuse of law-texts--documents of the highest importance in right hands, and in their proper place, but capable, as all must know, of leading to inconceivable absurdity in speculation, and not impossibly fatal confusion in fact.
The bulk of this pamphlet is devoted to the consideration of the language and effect, legal and constitutional, of those famous statutes with the titles of which recent controversy has made us so familiar. Mr. Gladstone makes it clear that it does not at all follow that because the Church conceded a great deal, she conceded, or even was expected to concede, indefinitely, whatever might be claimed. She conceded, but she conceded by compact;--a compact which supposed her power to concede, and secured to her untouched whatever was not conceded. And she did not concede, nor was asked for, her highest power, her legislative power. She did not concede, nor was asked to concede, that any but her own ministers--by the avowal of all drawing their spiritual authority from a source which nothing human could touch--should declare her doctrine, or should be employed in administering her laws. What she did concede was, not original powers of direction and guidance, but powers of restraint and correction;--under securities greater, both in form and in working, than those possessed at the time by any other body in England, for their rights and liberties--greater far than might have been expected, when the consequences of a long foreign supremacy--not righteously maintained and exercised, because at the moment unrighteously thrown off--increased 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