lesiastical
endowment for the Supreme Head of the Church. That title, granted him
four years before by both Convocations, was confirmed by Act of
Parliament; its object was to enable the King as Supreme Head to
effect the "increase of virtue in Christ's Religion within this Realm
of England, and to repress and extirp all Errors, Heresies and other
Enormities, and Abuses heretofore used in the same". The Defender of
the Faith was to be armed with more than a delegate power; he was to
be supreme in himself, the champion not of the Faith of any one else,
but of his own; and the qualifying clause, "as far as the law of
Christ allows," was omitted. His orthodoxy must be above suspicion, or
at least beyond the reach of open cavil in England. So new treasons
were enacted, and any one who called the King a heretic, schismatic,
tyrant, infidel, or usurper, was rendered liable to the heaviest
penalty which the law could inflict. As an earnest of the royal and
parliamentary desire for an increase of virtue in religion, an act was
concurrently passed providing for the creation of a number of
suffragan bishops.[924]

[Footnote 923: _Ibid._, vii., 1377.]

[Footnote 924: These were not actually created till
1540; the way in which Henry VIII. sought statutory
authority for every conceivable thing is very
extraordinary. There seems no reason why he could
not have created these bishoprics without
parliamentary authority.]

Henry was now Pope in England with powers no Pope had possessed.[925]
The Reformation is variously regarded as the liberation of the (p. 326)
English Church from the Roman yoke it had long impatiently borne,
as its subjection to an Erastian yoke which it was henceforth, with
more or less patience, long to bear, or as a comparatively unimportant
assertion of a supremacy which Kings of England had always enjoyed.
The Church is the same Church, we are told, before and after the
change; if anything, it was Protestant before the Reformation, and
Catholic after. It is, of course, the same Church. A man may be
described as the same man before and after death, and the business of
a coroner's jury is to establish the identity; but it does not ignore
the vital difference. Even Saul and Paul were the same man. And the
identity of the Church before and after the legislation of Henry VIII.
cov