There may be something in this. Yet your lordship, I think, does
not carry the matter quite far enough; and, with your leave, I will
presume to give another, and perhaps the truer, answer to Mr. SOMERS’S
difficulty. The subject is a little nice, but I have not those scruples
which may reasonably be conceived to restrain your lordship from
enlarging upon it.
I reply then directly, and without softening matters, that this
irregular translation of the supremacy is no proof that there was not
then a FREE CONSTITUTION, with a legitimate power in it, to which
the supremacy belonged. And my reason, without offence to my lord of
_Salisbury_, is this. When the papal authority was abolished, and
the question came into parliament, “who now became the head of the
church;” the search after him was not carried, where it should have
been, into the constitution of the kingdom; but, as it was a matter
of religion, they mistook that, which was only an affair of church
discipline, to be a doctrine of theology; and so searched, for a
solution of the question, in the New Testament, and Ecclesiastical
History. In the New Testament, obedience is pressed to the person of
Cæsar, because an absolute monarchy was the only government in being:
and, for the same reason, when afterwards the empire became Christian,
the supremacy, as we know from _ecclesiastical story_, was assumed
by the emperor: just as it would have been by the consul and senate,
had the republic existed. Hence our Reformers, going altogether by
spiritual and ecclesiastical example, and hoping thereby to preserve
their credit against the reproaches of _Rome_, which, as your lordship
knows, was perpetually charging them with novelties and innovations in
both respects, recurred to early antiquity for that rule.
This attention to ecclesiastical example was, I suppose, a
consideration of convenience with the wise fathers of our church: the
other appeal to the Gospel, might be a matter of conscience with them.
And thus by force of one text, ill-understood, _render unto_ CÆSAR
_the things which are_ CÆSAR’S, they put the spiritual sword into the
king’s hands; just as by another, _he beareth not the sword in vain_
(for I know of no better authority), the temporal sword had also been
committed to his care.