in England and the Papal See, and finally the great Act of Supremacy (26 Hen. VIII. c. 1) had transferred, as completely as language could do it, the papal authority to the King—had made Henry, as we have seen, Pope of England. On the other side, Paul III. had retaliated by a bull of excommunication and deposition against Henry and all his abettors, thus making the separation as complete as possible on both sides.
To estimate fairly the changes in doctrine and ritual is a less easy matter. There was nothing very revolutionary in the Articles of 1536, and still less in those of 1539; and neither Henry nor probably Cromwell had an}^ great sympathy with the Protestants: but the air was full of new doctrines and new views, and such measures as the destruction of shrines and images, and the translation of the Scriptures, tended to encourage the Protestant sectaries; while the separation from Rome, and the establishment of the King as the highest ecclesiastical authority, did the same in a still greater degree, by the shock which it gave to the old and time-honoured belief in the absolute unchangeableness and stability of the Church. The system of the Roman Church before the Reformation was, as it has since remained, a solid and consistent whole, each portion of it resting upon the same foundations, and guaranteed by the same warrants; and it was in the sixteenth century, as it remains still, impossible to throw over one part of it without exposing other parts to the same danger. But these changes in doctrine, slight as they appear in comparison with those made in the following reign, and far, as we see by Hooper's letter,[1] as they fell short of satisfying the Protestants, were none the less fatal to the catholicity of the English Church. They
- ↑ Infra, p. 94.
