by a demise of the crown. When
Henry died, therefore, the Primate and his suffragans took out fresh
commissions, empowering them to ordain and to govern the Church till the
new sovereign should think fit to order otherwise. When it was objected
that a power to bind and to loose, altogether distinct from temporal
power, had been given by our Lord to his apostles, some theologians of
this school replied that the power to bind and to loose had descended,
not to the clergy, but to the whole body of Christian men, and ought
to be exercised by the chief magistrate as the representative of the
society. When it was objected that Saint Paul had spoken of certain
persons whom the Holy Ghost had made overseers and shepherds of the
faithful, it was answered that King Henry was the very overseer,
the very shepherd whom the Holy Ghost had appointed, and to whom the
expressions of Saint Paul applied. [3]

These high pretensions gave scandal to Protestants as well as to
Catholics; and the scandal was greatly increased when the supremacy,
which Mary had resigned back to the Pope, was again annexed to the
crown, on the accession of Elizabeth. It seemed monstrous that a woman
should be the chief bishop of a Church in which an apostle had forbidden
her even to let her voice be heard. The Queen, therefore, found it
necessary expressly to disclaim that sacerdotal character which
her father had assumed, and which, according to Cranmer, had been
inseparably joined, by divine ordinance, to the regal function. When the
Anglican confession of faith was revised in her reign, the supremacy
was explained in a manner somewhat different from that which had been
fashionable at the court of Henry. Cranmer had declared, in emphatic
terms, that God had immediately committed to Christian princes the whole
cure of all their subjects, as well concerning the administration of
God's word for the cure of souls, as concerning the administration of
things political. [4] The thirty-seventh article of religion, framed
under Elizabeth, 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