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 Pope's delegate, and thus concentrating still more completely in his own hands the power of the Church. The state of things which Wolsey had thus brought about as a temporary phenomenon, the result of special circumstances (not absolutely without precedent in earlier times), Cromwell proposed to himself to render permanent and normal. What he proposed he also carried out, and in so doing he effected a revolution both in the civil and ecclesiastical government of the country; but the civil revolution was as nothing by comparison of the ecclesiastical, because the Parliament which acted as a check in the one case became an active ally in the other. The civil revolution was but the establishment of the King as an absolute monarch, and he remained, after all, absolute only by the consent, or we might almost say the connivance, of Parliament. Parliament retained its constitutional position and powers, and Henry VIII. showed on more than one occasion his consciousness that his own power, absolute as it practically was, was so only so long as he could reckon upon that connivance. The ecclesiastical revolution was vastly more thorough and complete, for not only did it increase to a great extent the previously existing power of the State over the Church, but it concentrated this power in the hands of the Crown; it destroyed for ever the double government in ecclesiastical matters which had existed in varying degrees in every state of Europe, and in England itself from the time of Augustine downwards; and above all, by placing a preponderating power in the hands of a lay sovereign and his lay vicar-general, and this not as a matter of mere personal submission but as a matter of law, it invaded the region of hitherto exclusively clerical rights in a