ded from the plan of the sovereign and the
resolutions of Parliament, in which the bishops themselves with few
exceptions took part. Perhaps a more deep-seated ground of difference
may be that the German bishops were more independent than the English,
and that an Emperor was then ruling who, being at the same time King
of Spain and Naples, troubled himself little about the unity of
Germany in particular; while in England a newly-formed strong
political power existed which made the national interests its own and
upheld them on all sides.

Despite all this the English Schism had nevertheless a deep inner
analogy with the German Reformation.

From the beginning the dispute as to jurisdiction was based on the
historical point of view, on which Luther too laid much stress.
Standish, who has been already mentioned, derived the right to limit
the ecclesiastical prerogatives, from this among other grounds, that
there were Christian churches in which they were altogether rejected,
for instance the rule as to the celibacy of the clergy was not
accepted by the Greeks. He inferred too, that, as no one disputed the
claim of the Greek Church to be Christian, the conception of the
universal Church must be different from that which Romanism asserts.
Both countries also found the groundwork of the true church-community
in Scripture. In the chief instance before them, that of the divorce,
the German theologians were not of the same mind as the English; but
both sides agreed in this, that there was a revealed will of God,
which the ecclesiastical power might not contravene: the conviction
took root that the Papacy did not represent the highest communion of
men with divine things, but that this rested on the divine record
alone. The use of Scripture had at last influenced various questions
in England also. For abolishing the Annates it was argued that such an
impost contradicts a maxim of the Apostle Paul; for doing away the
Papal jurisdiction, that no place of Scripture justifies it. This is
what was meant when the assertion that the Papacy is of divine right
was denied. This becomes quite clear when Henry VIII instead of the
previous prohibitions against distributing the Bible in the vernacular
gave his licence for it. As he once declared with great animation, the
advancement of God's word and of his own authority were one and the
same thing.[125] The engraved title-page of the translation which
appeared with his _privilegium_ puts int