Crown the origination of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, considering what else they claimed for it. Mr. Allen can present us with a more than Chinese idea of royal power, when he draws it only from Blackstone:—

They may have heard [he says, speaking of the "unlearned in the law"] that the law of England is founded in reason and wisdom. The first lesson they are taught will inform them, that the law of England attributes to the King absolute perfection, absolute immortality, and legal ubiquity. They will be told that the King of England is not only incapable of doing wrong, but of thinking wrong. They will be informed that he never dies, that he is invisible as well as immortal, and that in the eye of the law he is present at one and the same instant in every court of justice within his dominions…. They may have been told that the royal prerogative in England is limited; but when they consult the sages of the law, they will be assured that the legal authority of the King of England is absolute and irresistible … that all are under him, while he is under none but God….

If they have had the benefit of a liberal education, they have been taught that to obtain security for persons and property was the great end for which men submitted to the restraints of civil government; and they may have heard of the indispensable necessity of an independent magistracy for the due administration of justice; but when they direct their inquiries to the laws and constitution of England, they will find it an established maxim in that country that all jurisdiction emanates from the Crown. They will be told that the King is not ony the chief, but the sole magistrate of the nation; and that all others act by his commission, and in subordination to him.[2]

[2] Allen on the Royal Prerogative, pp. 1-3.

"In the most limited monarchy," as he says truly the "King is represented in law books, as in theory an absolute sovereign." "Even now," says Mr. Gladstone, "after three centuries of progress toward democratic sway, the Crown has prerogatives by acting upon which, within their strict and unquestioned bounds, it might at any time throw the country into confusion. And so has each House of Parliament." But if the absolute supremacy of the Crown in the legal point of mew exactly the same over temporal matters and causes as over spiritual, is taken by no sane man to be a literal fact in temporal matters, it is violating the analogy of the Constitution, and dealing with the most important subjects in a mere spirit of narrow perverseness, to insist that it can have none but a literal meaning in ecclesiastical matters; and that the Church did mean, though the State did not to accept a despotic prerogative, unbounded by custom, convention, or law, and unchecked by acknowledged and active powers in herself. Yet such is the assumption, made in bitterness and vexation of spirit by some of those who have lately so hastily given up her cause; made with singular assurance by others, who, Liberals in all their political doctrines, have, for want of better arguments, invoked prerogative against the Church.

What the securities and checks were that the Church, not less than the nation, contemplated and possessed, are not expressed in the theory itself of the royal prerogative; and, as in the ease of the nation, we might presume beforehand, that they would be found in practice rather than on paper. They were, however, real ones. "With the same theoretical laxity and practical security," as in the case of Parliaments and temporal judges, "was provision made for the conduct of Church affairs." Making allowance for the never absent disturbances arising out of political trouble and of personal character, the Church had very important means of making her own power felt in the administration of her laws, as well as in the making of them.

The real question, I apprehend, is this:—When the Church assented to those great concessions which were embodied in our permanent law at the Reformation, had she adequate securities that the powers so conveyed would be exercised, upon the whole, with a due regard to the integrity of her faith, and of her office, which was and has ever been a part of that faith? I do not ask whether these securities were all on parchment or not—whether they were written or unwritten—whether they were in statute, or in common law, or in fixed usage, or in the spirit of the Constitution and in the habits of the people—I ask the one vital question, whether, whatever they were in form, they were in substance sufficient?

The securities which the Church had were these: First, that the assembling of the Convocation was obviously necessary for the purposes of taxation; secondly and mainly, that the very solemn and fundamental laws by which the jurisdiction of the See of Rome was cut off, assigned to the spiritualty of the realm the care of matters spiritual, as distinctly and formally as to the temporalty the care of matters temporal; and that it was an understood principle, and (as long as it continued) a regular usage of the Constitution, that ecclesiastical laws should be administered by ecclesiastical judges. These were the securities on which the Church relied; on, which she had a right to rely; and on which, for a long series of years, her alliance was justified by the results.

And further:—

The Church had this great and special security on which to rely, that the Sovereigns of this country were, for a century after the Reformation, amongst her best instructed, and even in some instances her most devoted children: that all who made up the governing body (with an insignificant exception) owned personal allegiance to her, and that she might well rest on that personal allegiance as warranting beforehand the expectation, which after experience made good, that the office of the State towards her would be discharged in a friendly and kindly spirit, and that the principles of constitutional law and civil order would not be strained against her, but fairly and fully applied in her behalf.

These securities she now finds herself deprived of. This is the great change made in her position—made insensibly, and In a great measure, undesignedly—which has altered altogether the understanding on which she stood towards the Crown at the Reformation. It now turns out that that understanding, though it might have been deemed sufficient for the time, was not precise enough; and further, was not sufficiently looked after in the times which followed. And on us comes the duty of taking care that it be not finally extinguished; thrown off by the despair of one side, and assumed by the other as at length abandoned to their aggression.

Mr. Gladstone comes to the question with the feelings of a statesman, conscious of the greatness and excellence of the State, and anxious that the Church should not provoke its jealousy, and in urging her claims should "take her stand, as to all matters of substance and principle, on the firm ground of history and law." It makes his judgment on the present state of things more solemn, and his conviction of the necessity of amending it more striking, when they are those of one so earnest for conciliation and peace. But on constitutional not less than on other grounds, he pronounces the strongest condemnation on the present formation of the Court of Appeal, which, working in a way which even its framers