INTRODUCTORY. 35 



of action. The Lords accepted the revision, and sent the bill and 

 the book on to the Commons. Here a motion to debate the 

 subject of the alterations made by Convocation was only lost 

 by six votes (96 to 90), and the House unanimously voted that 

 * the amendments made by the Convocation might have been 

 debated, by the order of this House 1 .' 



Under this revision, the English Liturgy was modelled in 

 the direction of passive obedience on the part of the devout 

 subject, and of absolute power on the part of the king. The 

 Act of Uniformity confined all benefices in the Church to 

 episcopally ordained clergymen. Before the Reformation all 

 dignities in" the Church, and even benefices, below the 

 episcopal rank, could be held by laymen, or by divines of 

 foreign orders, and were frequently so held, not without con- 

 siderable public scandal in certain cases. Between the Refor- 

 mation and the Act of Uniformity, the clergy of foreign 

 Churches, not episcopally ordained, were admissible, and were 

 admitted to these endowments, and very possibly laymen. 

 At any rate, it was quite within the competence of the Crown 

 to dispense with all clerical conditions in the case of a 

 presentee. It is I repeat a curious illustration of the fact, 

 that the admission to Anglican orders was before this famous 

 Act no condition precedent to such a benefice, that the 

 sovereign is now, and has constantly been, a prebendary of 

 S. David's Cathedral. Parliament, which could alter the 

 conditions under which the subject should be entitled to 

 ecclesiastical preferment, could not interfere with the rights 

 of the Crown, unless by the sovereign's express sanction, a 

 form which survives to our own time. The capitular body of 

 I )avid's supplies an illustration of the qualifications for 

 ecclesiastical preferment in the days before the Act of Uni- 

 formity. Perhaps no Act of modern legislation has so 

 completely isolated the English clergy as this has. It has 

 made them a distinctly separate class, and fostered a theory, 



he views entertained by Parliament as to the competence of the Legislature to 

 deal with doctrine and ritual in the Church of England are strikingly illustrated by 

 st of April 5, 1689, when the Comprehension Bill was lost. 

 D 2 



