168 EDITOR. 



such grasp of principles, no such intrepidly destructive 

 and constructive genius. Contenting himself with res- 

 cuing from the Papacy those doctrines which he deemed 

 essential to human salvation, Luther left the Church to 

 constitute herself, or to be constituted by princes, as cir- 

 cumstances might direct. The mediaeval Church of 

 England became the Anglican Church of modern times 

 in virtue of one essential fact, that she surrendered, 

 under the mask of an evasion, her spiritual liberties to 

 the sovereign of the realm. This has been conclusively 

 established by Hallam, Macaulay, and others, and has 

 been treated as a self-evident truth by the highest 

 legal authorities in the England of to-day. That Henry 

 VIII. should assume spiritual supremacy need not sur- 

 prise us if we reflect that he and his generation believed 

 kings to be divinely endowed beings, capable of working 

 miracles by their touch. Neither Luther nor the fathers 

 of Anglicanism, in digging the foundations for the Re- 

 formed Church, cleared out the debris of Romanism and 

 of feudalism. They retained enough of Romanism to 

 change the Christian pastorate into a priesthood, enough 

 of feudalism to exalt kings, nobles, and ' upper ' classes 

 generally into an Unchristian pre-eminence and to de- 

 press the body of the people. Calvin alone went sans 

 phrase to the Bible and to God, with a view to re-consti- 

 tuting both the pastorate and the congregation on the 

 apostolic model. From the authoritative documents of 

 the apostolic age, he drew the doctrine, the discipline, 

 the rights, the powers, of the Christian Church. Whether 

 he fell or did not fall into errors of his own is not now 

 the question ; it is clear, at all events, that this was re- 

 formation in a deeper sense than that in which the word 

 applies either to the Lutheran or the Anglican com- 

 munions ; and the instinct of the sixteenth century, 



