lation, 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