n of
people according to their preeminence and degrees, to the utter
impoverishment and undoing of many light and inexpert persons inclined to
pride, the mother of all vices: Be it enacted,"[415]--but I need not enter
into the particulars of the uniforms worn by the nobles and gentlemen of
the court of Henry VIII.; the temper, not the detail, is of importance; and
of the wisdom or unwisdom of such enactments, we who live in a changed age
should be cautious of forming a hasty opinion. The ends which the old
legislation proposed to itself, have in latter ages been resigned as
impracticable. We are therefore no longer adequate judges how far those
ends may in other times have been attainable, and we can still less judge
of the means through which the attainment of them was sought.

The second act of which I have to speak is open to no such ambiguity; it
remains among the few which are and will be of perpetual moment in our
national history. The conduct of the pope had forced upon the parliament
the reconsideration of the character of his supremacy; and when the
question had once been asked, in the existing state of feeling but one
answer to it was possible.

The authority of the church over the state, the supreme kingship of Christ,
and consequently of him who was held to be Christ's vicar, above all
worldly sovereignties, was an established reality of mediaeval Europe. The
princes had with difficulty preserved their jurisdiction in matters purely
secular; while in matters spiritual, and in that vast section of human
affairs in which the spiritual and the secular glide one into the other,
they had been compelled--all such of them as lay within the pale of the
Latin communion--to acknowledge a power superior to their own. To the popes
was the ultimate appeal in all causes of which the spiritual courts had
cognisance. Their jurisdiction had been extended by an unwavering pursuit
of a single policy, and their constancy in the twelfth century was rewarded
by absolute victory. In England, however, the field was no sooner won than
it was again disputed, and the civil government gave way at last only when
the danger seemed to have ceased. So long as the papacy was feared, so long
as the successors of St. Peter held a sword which could inflict sensible
wounds, and enforce obedience by penalties, the English kings had resisted
both the theory and the application. While the pope was dangerous he was
dreaded and opposed. When age had