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 protest against national grievances rather than part of a cosmopolitan movement towards doctrinal change. It originated in political exigencies, local and not universal in import; and was the work of Kings and statesmen, whose minds were absorbed in national problems, rather than of divines whose faces were set towards the purification of the universal Church. It was an ecclesiastical counterpart of the growth of nationalities at the expense of the medieval ideal of the unity of the civilised world. Its effect was to make the Church in England the Church of England, a national Church, recognising as its head the English King, using in its services the English tongue, limited in its jurisdiction to the English Courts, and fenced about with a uniformity imposed by the English legislature. This nationalisation of the Church had one other effect: it brought to a sudden end the medieval struggle between Church and State. The Church had only been enabled to wage that conflict on equal terms by the support it received as an integral part of the visible Church on earth; and when that support was withdrawn it sank at once into a position of dependence upon the State. From the time of the submission of the clergy to Henry VIII there has been no instance of the English Church successfully challenging the supreme authority of the State.

It was mainly on these lines, laid down by Henry VIII, that the Reformation continued under Edward VI. The papal jurisdiction was no more; the use of English had been partially introduced into the services of the Church; the Scriptures had been translated; steps had been taken in the direction of uniformity, doctrinal and liturgical; and something had been done to remove medieval accretions, such as the worship of images, and to restore religion to what Reformers considered its primitive purity. That Henry intended his so-called " settlement " to be final is an assumption at variance with some of the evidence; for he had entrusted his son's education exclusively to men of the New Learning, he had given the same party an overwhelming preponderance in the Council of Regency, and according to Cranmer he was bent in the last few months of his life upon a scheme for pulling down roods, suppressing the ringing of bells and turning the Mass into a Communion. Cranmer himself had for some years been engaged upon a reform of the Church services which developed into the First Book of Common Prayer, and the real break in religious policy came, not at the accession of Edward VI, but after the fall of Somerset and the expulsion of the Catholics from the Council. The statute procured by Henry VIII from Parliament, which enabled his son, on coming of age, to annul all Acts passed during his minority, was probably due to an overweening sense of the importance of the kingly office; but, although it was repealed in Edward's first year, it inevitably strengthened the natural doubts of the competence of the Council to exercise an ecclesiastical supremacy vested in the King. No government, however, could afford to countenance