gious feeling, which continues to blacken the heart with unhallowed zeal to drown opposition in blood.. When men in power resent the injury done to their pride, by sects who question their exclusive right of place, when they dread being dispossessed by those sects, or apprehend a loss of public respect-then it is that they are a prey to furious, persecuting passions, encouraged by the common voice of the party, and confirmed by the hostility of the opposing sects, hostility which their own breasts reflect, and all sanctified, even in their own eyes, by the bigotry which they indulge as a self excuse. But as the clergy are, under a good government, kept in their proper sphere, and consequently have not the same motives to work upon the passions of the multitude, while no particular sect so exclusively occupies the road of preferment and honour, as to have a direct interest in suppressing others-people soon begin to regard each other's opinions with the genuine spirit of Christianity and philosophy.

Though the Reformation, in regard to religion, had advanced little, much had, in reality, been done. The power of Parliament to regulate the Church had been fully recognized, and the circum. stances which retarded change could not operate long. Great powers had indeed been transferred to the throne; but, being derived from the legis lature, they could, upon every just principle, be resumed by the same authority; and, in one respect, they have been erroneously exaggerated. If the constitutional language were to be literally in

terpreted, the sovereign is absolute proprietor of every man and thing within the realm—the parliament is his-the people are his, &c. But, it is superfluous to add, that this is not the principle of the Constitution-which gives the right of reigning, subject to the condition of his governing according to law, and under direction of his great council the Parliament; and that his will can only be signified, and acted upon, through the legal channels. Had this been duly weighed, certain writers would not have discovered such a fund of obloquy in the statutes which gave the king supremacy over the Church. The great object of those statutes was to rescue the kingdom from a foreign yoke, and to prevent the English clergy from establishing independent authority in their own body; in a word, to bring ecclesiastical causes, like the civil, under the controul of the sovereign, in his capacity of chief magistrate and fountain of justice: But the prerogative being bounded by the provisions of the legislature-provisions too ample indeed in that reign-the supremacy abstractly considered, implies no unreasonable power in the crown; and does not in reality involve any question about the respective merits of ecclesiastical establishments, except in so far as the clergy maintain, that their order is a divine institution which ought to be independ ent of civil government. Wherever there is a religion of the state, it ought, in the nature of things, to be erastian or subordinate to the civil constitution. If it be otherwise, there must necessarily either be such a clashing of interests between the church

and state, as will prove destructive of public peace, and, in the common case, end in the ruin of the religious establishment, or the monarch will form a junction with the priesthood prejudicial to the rest of the community, since each will, from their mutual interest, assist the other in usurpations upon public rights. The last had occurred under the Romish yoke, and still continued in Catholic monarchies; the former was strikingly exemplified in Scotland by the Presbyterian system, while it flourished in primitive vigour. It is true that Presbyterianism has since proved itself in that country perfectly compatible with monarchy; but it should always be remembered, that it only acquired that character after its powers were so abridged, that it had virtually become erastian*. It is the patronage of the crown, and not the supremacy, which gives it influence: Henry's great authority was derived from the other statutes as well as from his patronage, and not from those which conferred upon him the supremacy.

On the death of Henry VIII. the succession opened to his son Edward VI. then a boy of nine years and four months old. By Henry's will, which he had been empowered by statute to make, sixteen persons had been nominated his executors and regents of the kingdom till his son should

Those who have attentively perused Baillie's Letters, will be satisfied that the gentlest disposition in an ecclesiastic-and I quote Baillie, because he was naturally remarkably mild-does not secure him against a desire to establish a church government inconsistent with the civil.

complete his eighteenth year; and of these the young king's uncle, the Earl of Hartford, afterwards created Duke of Somerset, was chosen protector of the realm and governor of Edward's person. To these, twelve were added as a privy council, to assist them in public affairs. The regents differed upon the important subject of religion, some being for the old, and the rest for the new; but the majority, with the protector at their head, having declared for the Reformation, carried measures for promoting it, in spite of opposition from the minority, joined by the greater part of the bishops and inferior clergy, who still adhered to the principles of the Romish creed. Persecution upon the bloody statute was stopt; the prison doors were thrown open to those who suffered under it; and exiles, of whom several were afterwards preferred to great benefices, returned in safety and honour to their native country: Images, soul-masses, &c. were treated as superstitions; a book of homilies, more freely composed, was published by authority as a substitute for preaching ministers, of whom there was a great deficiency; a royal visitation was appointed, and new injunctions, likewise of a more liberal kind, were delivered by the visitors along with the homilies, to the clergy throughout the kingdom. The first measures were adopted without the intervention of the legislature, in virtue of the powers conferred upon the crown by the statutes about proclamations, and by that which authorised the recal of the statute of six articles. But parliament soon

met, and formally repealed, not only all laws which made any thing treason that was not specified in the 25 of Edward III., but two statutes against Lollardies, the bloody statute with the acts which followed in explanation of it, all laws in the late reign declaring any thing to be felony that had not been so before, together with the statutes which made royal proclamations, in certain respects, of equal authority with acts of the legislature. It was particularly enacted too, that all processes in the spiritual courts should run in the king's name*. Some deanries and chauntries had been given to Henry, and the remaining chauntry lands, with legacies for obits, &c. were now granted to the crown, under the pretext of maintaining grammar-schools out of the revenue; but the hungry courtiers, of whom several were gratified with new titles or peerages, engrossed all, either in the form of gifts, or of purchases at low rates †.

It would be inconsistent with our plan to specify particularly the alterations in the public creed and worship during this short reign; suffice it to say, that the altar was turned into a communion table, and the idolatry of the mass converted into a common sacrament, the real presence having, latterly, ceased to be longer an article of faith; that images were pulled down, the invocation of saints prohibited, and the mass books called in; that the marriage of the cler

Burnet, Part II. b. i. Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials, vol. ii. b.i. Neal's History of the Puritans, vol. i. c. ii.

+ Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials, vol. ii. p. 63, 362. Burnet, vol. iii. p. 84, 125. Neal, vol. i. p. 51.