f that we ourselves have no grudge nor
displeasure towards your lay subjects our ghostly children. We intreat your
Grace of your accustomed goodness to us your bedemen to continue our chief
protector, defender, and aider in and for the execution of our office and
duty; specially touching repression of heresy, reformation of sin, and due
behaviour and order of all your Grace's subjects, spiritual and temporal;
which (no doubt thereof) shall be much to the pleasure of God, great
comfort to men's souls, quietness and unity of all your realm; and, as we
think, most principally to the great comfort of your Grace's Majesty. Which
we beseech lowly upon our knees, so entirely as we can, to be the author of
unity, charity, and concord as above, for whose preservation we do and
shall continually pray to Almighty God long to reign and prosper in most
honourable estate to his pleasure."

This was the bishops' defence; the best which, under the circumstances,
they considered themselves capable of making. The House of Commons had
stated their complaints in the form of special notorious facts; the bishops
replied with urging the theory of their position, and supposed that they
could relieve the ecclesiastical system from the faults of its ministers,
by laying the sole blame on the unworthiness of individual persons. The
degenerate representatives of a once noble institution could not perhaps be
expected to admit their degeneracy, and confess themselves, as they really
were, collectively incompetent; yet the defence which they brought forward
would have been valid only so long as the blemishes were the rare
exceptions in the working of an institution which was still generally
beneficent. It was no defence at all when the faults had become the rule,
and when there was no security in the system itself for the selection of
worth and capacity to exercise its functions. The clergy, as I have already
said, claimed the privileges of saints, while their conduct fell below the
standard of that of ordinary men; and the position taken in this answer was
tenable only on the hypothesis which it, in fact, deliberately asserted,
that the judicial authority of the church had been committed to it by God
Himself; and that no misconduct of its ministers in detail could forfeit
their claims or justify resistance to them.

There is something touching in the bishops' evidently sincere
unconsciousness that there could be real room for blame. Warham, who had