Convocation of the Province of Canterbury, 1603-4, subsequently adopted by the Convocation of York, but which never received the confirmation of the laity in Parliament, not even in the Act of 1835. Indeed, so far is that Act from confirming that Canon, that it contradicts its main proposition by legitimating already contracted marriages which this Canon pronounces 'incestuous and not lawful . . . and void from the beginning.' Against this Canon of such partial authority is to be weighed the later declaration of the Church of England contained in the authorized version of 1611, accepted by the whole Church, the sovereign, the clergy, and the laity, and appointed to be read in the public service."
I think the above passage plainly shows that Dr. M'Caul conceives the translation of the authorized version to be conclusive in its exposition (or as he terms it interpretation), and that he even assigns such efficiency to this translation, as to regard it (in the last sentence above quoted) in the light of a repeal of the Canon of 1603-4, for one does not otherwise see the force of his observation that this "declaration of the Church of England" has been accepted by the Clergy. The translation of the Bible is, in other words, supposed in 1611 to have got rid, by a side-wind, of a solemn Canon passed about eight years previously, and the King and Parliament are taken to have acquiesced in this ingenious contrivance.
