t. Their
audacity displayed at once the power which they possessed, and the temper
in which they were disposed to use it. The Archbishop of Canterbury seems
to have been responsible for this monstrous order, which unfortunately was
carried into execution before Henry had time to interfere.[342] It was the
last act of the kind, however, in which he was permitted to indulge, and
the legislature made haste to take away such authority from hands so
incompetent to use it. From their debates upon burning the dead Tracy,
convocation were proceeding to discuss the possibility of burning the
living Latimer,[343] when they were recalled to their senses by a summons
to prepare some more reasonable answer than that which the bishops had made
for them on their privilege of making laws. Twenty more years of work were
to be lived by Latimer before they were to burn him, and their own
delinquencies were for the present of a more pressing nature. The House of
Commons at the same time proceeded to frame necessary bills on the other
points of their complaint.

The first act upon the roll recalls the Constitutions of Clarendon and the
famous quarrel between Becket and the Crown. When Catholicism was a living
belief, when ordained priests were held really and truly to possess those
awful powers which the mystery of transubstantiation assigns to them, they
were acknowledged by common consent to be an order apart from the rest of
mankind, and being spiritual men, to be amenable only to spiritual
jurisdiction. It was not intended that, if they committed crimes, they
should escape the retributive consequences of those crimes: offenders
against the law might (originally at least) be degraded, if the bishops
thought good, and stripped of their commission be delivered thus to the
secular arm. But the more appropriate punishment for such persons was of a
more awful kind, proportioned to the magnitude of the fault; and was
conveyed or held to be conveyed in the infliction of the spiritual death of
excommunication. Excommunication was, in real earnest, the death of the
soul, at a time when communion with the church was the only means by which
the soul could be made partaker of the divine life; and it was a noble
thing to believe that there was something worse for a man than legal
penalties on his person or on his mortal body; it was beautiful to
recognise in an active living form, that the heaviest ill which could
befall a man was to be cut off from G