tand with the laws of Almighty God and of your Realm
heretofore made, which we most humbly beseech your Grace to ratify and
approve by your most Royal assent for the better execution of the same in
times to come."[358]

The acknowledgment appeared to be complete, and might perhaps have been
accepted without minute examination, except for the imprudent acuteness of
the Lower House of Convocation. As it passed through their hands, they
discovered--what had no doubt been intended as a loophole for future
evasion--that the grounds which were alleged to excuse the submission were
the virtues of the reigning king: and therefore, as they sagaciously
argued, the submission must only remain in force for his life. They
introduced a limitation to that effect. Some further paltry dabbling was
also attempted with the phraseology: and at length, impatient with such
dishonest trifling, and weary of a discussion in which they had resolved to
allow but one conclusion, the king and the legislature thought it well to
interfere with a high hand, and cut short such unprofitable folly. The
language of the bishops was converted into an act of parliament; a mixed
commission was appointed to revise the canon law, and the clergy with a few
brief strokes were reduced for ever into their fit position of
subjects.[359] Thus with a moderate hand this great revolution was
effected, and, to outward appearance, with offence to none except the
sufferers, whose misuse of power when they possessed it deprived them of
all sympathy in their fall.

But no change of so vast a kind can be other than a stone of stumbling to
those many persons for whom the beaten ways of life alone are tolerable,
and who, when these ways are broken, are bewildered and lost. Religion,
when men are under its influence at all, so absorbs their senses, and so
pervades all their associations, that no faults in the ministers of it can
divest their persons of reverence; and just and necessary as all these
alterations were, many a pious and noble heart was wounded, many a man was
asking himself in his perplexity where things would end, and still more
sadly, where, if these quarrels deepened, would lie his own duty. Now the
Nun of Kent grew louder in her Cassandra wailings. Now the mendicant friars
mounted the pulpits exclaiming sacrilege; bold men, who feared nothing that
men could do to them, and who dared in the king's own presence, and in his
own chapel, to denounce him by name.[360]