These proceedings show plainly the breakdown of Cromwell's system of absolutism. We have here come a very long way from the Parliament of Henry VIII., ready in almost every case to register the 'King's will,' and give the sanction of law to his every caprice. It is in the executive rather than in the legislative acts of the reign that we find the true justification of its character as a revolutionary era. Henry VIII., as we have seen, while he had completely revolutionised the relation of Church and State, had made but little change in the condition of the churches or in the character of the ritual. He had abolished some images, which had already become scandalous, and had done away with the shrines of a few saints, whose wealth had almost become a byword, and the pilgrimages to which had already given rise to notorious abuses; but in the main he had left the churches and their services very much as they were. The altars stood as of old, the priests wore their gorgeous vestments and offered their masses as before, the choirs chanted, the organs rolled, the incense arose in clouds above the bowed heads of the worshippers, exactly as old men remembered it in their youth, and as they supposed their fathers had seen it before them. The transition from all this to the second Prayer Book of Edward VI., with the altar pulled down and replaced by a plain table in the middle of the church—an o3sterboard, as the men of the old faith called it in derision—with all the images and shrines removed, the priest changed into a minister in a simple white surplice—sometimes without even that, and mostly murmuring at being compelled to wear it—was as great as that which we should see if we walked out of St. Paul's into the nearest Primitive Methodist meeting-house—nay, it was even greater. The doctrinal changes, though far greater
