jects. His rapacity
was gratified by plundering the church, his bigotry and arrogance by
persecuting heretics. Though he engaged the parliament to mitigate
the penalties of the six articles, so far as regards the marriage
of priests, which was now only subjected to a forfeiture of goods,
chattels, and lands during life, he was still equally bent on
maintaining a rigid purity in speculative principles. He had appointed
a commission, consisting of the two archbishops and several bishops
of both provinces, together with a considerable number of doctors of
divinity; and by virtue of his ecclesiastical supremacy, he had
given them in charge to choose a religion for his people. Before the
commissioners had made any progress in this arduous undertaking, the
parliament, in 1541, had passed a law by which they ratified all the
tenets which these divines should thereafter establish with the king's
consent: and they were not ashamed of thus expressly declaring that they
took their religion upon trust, and had no other rule, in spiritual
as well as temporal concerns, than the arbitrary will of their master.
There is only one clause of the statute which may seem at first sight
to savor somewhat of the spirit of liberty: it was enacted, that the
ecclesiastical commissioners should establish nothing repugnant to the
laws and statutes of the realm. But in reality this proviso was inserted
by the king to serve his own purposes. By introducing a confusion and
contradiction into the laws, he became more master of every one's life
and property. And as the ancient independence of the church still gave
him jealousy, he was well pleased, undercover of such a clause, to
introduce appeals from the spiritual to the civil courts. It was for a
like reason that he would never promulgate a body of canon law; and he
encouraged the judges on all occasions to interpose in ecclesiastical
causes, wherever they thought the law of royal prerogative concerned; a
happy innovation, though at first invented for arbitrary purposes.

The king, armed by the authority of parliament, or rather by their
acknowledgment of that spiritual supremacy which he believed inherent
in him, employed his commissioners to select a system of tenets for
the assent and belief of the nation. A small volume was soon after
published, called the Institution of a Christian Man, which was received
by the convocation, and voted to be the standard of orthodoxy. All the
delicate points of j