he Pope's delegates, and received through him their
jurisdiction.

Can a claim be true which is driven to shifts such as this for its
maintenance? Or can the truth of Christianity and the unity of the Church
rest upon a falsehood? Is infidelity itself in such "a hopeful
position,"[164] as regards Christianity, that it is really come to this,
that we must either receive a plain and manifest usurpation, or be cast out
of the house and kingdom of God? That we must reject the witness and
history of the first six hundred years of the Church's life on the one
hand, or be plunged into the abyss of infidelity on the other? If it be
true that the Pope is Monarch of the Church, which is the present Papal
theory, the Church of England is in schism. If it be not true, she is at
least clear of that fatal mark. All that is required for her position is
the maintenance of that Nicene Constitution which we have heard St. Leo
solemnly declare was to last to the end of the world, viz. that every
province of the Church be governed by its own Bishops under its own
Metropolitan. And who then but will desire that the successor of St. Peter
should hold St. Peter's place? Will the Patriarch of Constantinople, or the
Archbishop of Moscow, or the Primate of Canterbury, so much as think of
assuming it? Be this our answer when we are accused of not really holding
that article of the Creed "one Catholic and Apostolic Church." Let the
Bishop of Rome require of us that honour and power which he possessed at
the Synod of Chalcedon, _that, and not a totally different one under the
same name_, and we shall be in schism when we do not yield it. At present
we have no farther separated from him than to fall back on the constitution
of the Church of the Martyrs and the Fathers.

But, it may be said, is the Catholic Church unanimous on the one hand, and
the Anglican communion, restricted to one small province, left alone in her
protest on the other? Did not she, whom they would call "the already
decrepit rebel of three hundred years," submit from 596 to 1534 to that
very authority which she now denies? It would be quite beyond my present
limits to trace, as I had first purposed, the Roman Bishop's power from
that point at which it stood when St. Gregory sent our Apostle Augustin
into England, to that point which it had reached in the thirteenth century,
and which it strove to maintain in the sixteenth. I can only now very
briefly point out a few of the steps