Page:The Church of England, its catholicity and continuity.djvu/89

 lawful wife or else be excommunicated, Henry caused a sermon every Sunday to be preached in S. Paul's by one of the Bishops, to teach the people that the Pope should no longer be supreme in England. The same year, 1534, an Act was passed to compel the clergy to submit to Henry's decision and to hinder them from appealing to Rome in their difficulties. The same year it was decided, by Convocation of the clergy, that "the Pope has no greater jurisdiction conferred upon him by God in Holy Scripture in the kingdom of England than any other foreign Bishop." This was passed before Parliament expressed the same sentiment in a law. So we see that the Church itself, and not the State, took the primary matter first in hand. Parliament next decided that no Bishop nor clergyman should be accepted to serve in our English cures who had been nominated by the Pope of Rome. Notwithstanding these important changes, the king made it known through a statute that he had no intention "to vary from the Catholic faith of Christendom or in anything declared in Holy Scripture and the Word of God to be necessary to salvation." The great Act of this new movement was passed in November, 1534—The Act of Supremacy. This made the king the supreme Governor of the Church, and it embodied in its declaration the decision arrived at in Convocation, to which I have already referred. This Act declares that the king "justly and rightly is and ought to be supreme head of the Church of England, and is so recognized by the clergy of the realm in their Convocation. . . . Be it enacted by the authority of this present Parliament that the king, his heirs and successors, kings of this realm, shall be