tutional system of government. The
question of the divorce presented to More no serious difficulty. Untenable
as Henry's claim seemed to the now Chancellor, his faith in the
omnipotence of Parliament would have enabled him to submit to any statute
which named a new spouse as queen and her children as heirs to the crown.
But as Cromwell's policy unfolded itself he saw that more than this was
impending. The Catholic instinct of his mind, the dread of a rent
Christendom and of the wars and bigotry that must come of its rending,
united with More's theological convictions to resist any spiritual
severance of England from the Papacy. His love for freedom, his revolt
against the growing autocracy of the crown, the very height and grandeur
of his own spiritual convictions, all bent him to withstand a system which
would concentrate in the king the whole power of Church as of State, would
leave him without the one check that remained on his despotism, and make
him arbiter of the religious faith of his subjects. The later revolt of
the Puritans against the king-worship which Cromwell established proved
the justice of the prevision which forced More in the spring of 1532 to
resign the post of Chancellor.

[Sidenote: England and Rome]

But the revolution from which he shrank was an inevitable one. Till now
every Englishman had practically owned a double life and a double
allegiance. As citizen of a temporal state his life was bounded by English
shores and his loyalty due exclusively to his English king. But as citizen
of the state spiritual he belonged not to England but to Christendom. The
law which governed him was not a national law but a law that embraced
every European nation, and the ordinary course of judicial appeals in
ecclesiastical cases proved to him that the sovereignty in all matters of
conscience or religion lay not at Westminster but at Rome. Such a
distinction could scarcely fail to bring embarrassment with it as the
sense of national life and national pride waxed stronger; and from the
reign of the Edwards the problem of reconciling the spiritual and temporal
relations of the realm grew daily more difficult. Parliament had hardly
risen into life when it became the organ of the national jealousy whether
of any Papal jurisdiction without the realm or of the separate life and
separate jurisdiction of the clergy within it. The movement was long
arrested by religious reaction and civil war. But the fresh sense of
nat