its course, no longer to the restraining of legal cruelty, but
to the injury of innocence and the encouragement of crime, and
encouraging that worse evil--a sympathy with wickedness justly
punished rather than with the law, whether of God or man,
unjustly violated. So men have continued to cry out against the
power of the Crown after the Crown had been shackled hand and
foot; and to express the greatest dread of popular violence
long after that violence was exhausted, and the anti-popular
party was not only rallied, but had turned the tide of battle,
and was victoriously pressing upon its enemy."

The view which Dr Arnold gives of the parties in England during the
sixteenth century--that great epoch of English genius--is remarkable for
its candour and moderation. He considers the distinctions which then
prevailed in England as political rather than religious, "inasmuch as
they disputed about points of church government, without any reference
to a supposed priesthood; and because even those who maintained that one
or another form was to be preferred, because it was of divine
appointment, were influenced in their interpretation of the doubtful
language of the Scriptures by their own strong persuasion of what that
language could not but mean to say."

And he then concludes by the unanswerable remark, that in England,
according to the theory of the constitution during the sixteenth
century, church and state were one. The proofs of this proposition are
innumerable--not merely the act by which the supremacy was conferred on
Henry VIII.--not merely the powers, almost unlimited, in matters
ecclesiastical, delegated to the king's vicegerent, that vicegerent
being a layman--not merely the communion established by the sole
authority of Edward VI.--without the least participation in it by any