determine with certainty, and very unimportant when it is determined. Let it be admitted for the sake of the argument. It still remains true that the first primate, whose successor, after a sort, still sits at Canterbury, was a missionary sent direct from Pope Gregory the Great, in 597; that Theodore, the great reorganiser of the see, was also a papal missionary; that the Scoto-Irish converts in the North under Wilfrid's primacy formally submitted to Rome at the Synod of Whitby in 664, Colman, the leader on the other side, and those who would not submit, shaking off the dust from their feet and departing; and that Saxon England for the first time became a nation some 150 years later. These few facts alone—and there are others like them—serve to show plainly that national, in modern English ecclesiastical history, has often the same meaning as non-national elsewhere. Could we call the civil government of any country national, if its highest Court of Appeal was foreign, its highest officers were often appointed by a foreign power, and always paid tribute to it, and if its highest native judge,[1] when by indirect means he had succeeded in getting the final appeals mostly into his own hands, yet always gave his decisions avowedly as the delegate of a foreign potentate? Clearly, if we use the word national to describe such a state of things, we use it in a sense not only differing from, but contrary to, its common acceptation. The result, then, of our review of the history of the Church in England before the reign of Henry VIII. is, that we find that up to that time there was not, and indeed could not be, a National Church in any intelligible sense of the words.
Positively the only historical facts which tend
- ↑ Wolsey.
