To be the supreme head, therefore, over a Christian people, is the most ancient prerogative of the British Crown, and those who break or weaken that tie can certainly find no precedent in all history for their proceedings. Henry VIII. could trace the blood of the British monarchs in his veins; and, in his person, an Act of Parliament conveyed the supremacy back again to the Crown, from which the Pope had usurped it. But the use of that power, if applied to the purposes for which it was created, is like that first permitted to Constantine the Great it is the right and the power of maintaining, supported by national councils, the faith and truth. We do not think that the evils arising from the supremacy of the Pope would be greater than those which would be felt by the Church of England if, in addition to the endowment of Maynooth and the admission of the Jesuits, the Popish priesthood should be endowed, should share the revenues of the established clergy, and be cantoned, by legal provision, side by side with the parochial clergy through England and Ireland. This measure would be more fatal to the peace of the Church and the country than any evil that has happened to it; but this change could not take place without the consent of the Crown, and the particular power of the supremacy was given to it chiefly for the prevention of these rivalries, for that power proceeds from the clergy chiefly: the lay members of the Church join in the investiture also; but the power never would have been reposed in the Crown without the investiture of the bishops. When it accepted the power it also promised its patronage and protection: the endowments of land are the connecting links between the parties: the Sovereign will have homage for the land; but the priest will not pay it unconditionally, unless the Sovereign will guarantee to him those divine rights which his order inherit from heaven; and, together with them, they bring some most valuable rights to the people. So long as the Sovereign is head of the Church he is bound to recognise and protect a State clergy; and the strongest part of the prerogative is derived from this union: social order gains some of its best support from it, and of its utility and importance every day's experience convinces us. The primogeniture, and public revenue for that institution, issue from this quarter: whilst the Sovereign maintains that primogeniture in the law, and will not permit a change in the ancient principle of God's fee as the basis of the right of the State clergy, he establishes his own prerogative and the privileges of the peers, as the dispenser of the land and the source of all landed right, and he keeps, by his prerogative, an hold both on opinion and in law, as to the sacredness and fixity of landed inheritance.

These opinions, and many others of a similar nature, are the

consequences of recognizing the divine right of the clergy as an estate of the realm, and of the powers which they convey to the prerogative and which are implied in the supremacy. the clergy were a private body of men-if, like many corporations, their estates were of a private nature-the Sovereign would not claim the power over them which he now holds. The Crown has no authority over the great corporate bodies which are connected with the Church-such as the National Society, that for the Propagation of the Gospel, the Church Missionary, and similar bodies. The Crown could withdraw its charter, but could not touch their finances. The Sovereign and the Legislature might interfere with the funds of the Church, but they have no power over the corporate body of the Clergy abstracted from their endowments, who, on the contrary, possess great power over them, since they have the power of excommunication, which is a very important hold upon public opinion, as well as an original sacred force in itself. But it is one of the mischiefs introduced by Popery, that, having abused it by deposing and murdering sovereigns, the Church is half afraid of communicating to the great men of the earth that excommunication extends equally to all, and that, whether sovereign or subject, they are equally exposed to it: it extends no farther than shutting the church doors against the offending party, but it is a penalty which we think no sovereign would venture to incur. Yet it is almost the only safeguard which the Church possesses to prevent the Minister from making use of the Crown power for the introduction of greater corruptions than those which Parliament ended by taking the supremacy from the Pope and bestowing it on the Sovereign. When that Act was made, the convocation of the clergy was a party to it; but no law which changes the nature of the endowments of the State clergy can be binding in the sight of God, unless they are consulted on the act. The Crown holding the supremacy ought not to suffer these innovations but we presume that, like the kingdom of heaven, the Crown suffers violence even until now. The powers communicated to the Crown by its union with the laws of the Gospel are so strong and deep that not even the shock of the French Revolution has been able to extinguish them in the French Crown; and the remains of them are still left there, notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of the French monarchy. The philosophic mind of M. Guizot has ably traced this character of their monarchy; but it is in a much greater degree that of the British Crown, which still retains in the prerogative the high, majestic, and indispensable superiorities with which the ancient laws of the empire have invested it, as the vicarius summi regis,

;

to preserve the language of the laws of Edward the Confessor, collected by William the Conqueror, from all the landed gentry of the kingdom. It is the virtue of this investiture of united authority which modern law calls the supremacy; or, to use the philosophic language of the French Minister for Foreign Affairs:

"The Crown becomes an intelligent person, which has its ideas, sentiments, and its desires, like other animated beings. That person had rights and duties-the duty was to govern conformably to the Charter and in accordance with the great public powers: that duty had never failed, and would never be wanting. He repeated that the Crown was an intelligent person, and not a mere machine, made to occupy a place which others might take."

This definition of a monarch is more completely applicable to the British than to the French Crown; but if Sir Robert Peel and the present Lord Chancellor are permitted to pour their advice into the royal ear, the throne will become a sibyl's cave, which will give utterance to such oracles as may be in accordance with the theories of government and the political and financial speculations of the administration of the day. Instead of the animation, the perfection, and the consistency, which were imparted to it by the State union with the Gospel, it will no longer look, as it was wont, towards heaven; but, under the tutelage of Sir Robert Peel, like the spirit of mammon, it will, even in the celestial realms, look on the ground, and contemplate only the gold on the pavement in heaven: the Crown, under the keeping of a corrupt minister, forgetting all its nobler prerogatives, will sacrifice the bread of life to vulgar bread and the cheapest corn; and the Minister of this great empire, on which the sun never sets, will proclaim over all the earth the great maxim of his empire—

Εσθιε πιε τάλλα δε εδεν

To those who watch public opinion it must appear that American principles are becoming popular in our country; that they pervade the House of Commons, and are spreading in our great commercial cities: our Administration favours them; and however extraordinary it may appear, the Crown has been made the instrument of their introduction, by a series of Parliamentary enactments which have the same tendency. But the transition from a popular to a democratic constitution cannot take place without the further consent of the Sovereign; but that consent has been aiding this change by a suspension or perversion of those prerogatives and duties which are attached to the supremacy these are gradually suffered to become obsolete, and will ultimately vanish when it will be found that the British monarchy

is little more than an hereditary democracy. The law courts are lending their powerful patronage towards this revolution; the barristers being chiefly Whigs, if not democrats. As the Americans hold their lands unconditionally, in imitation of them our new modes of conveyance, and other legal forms, seem to forget that lands with us are held under Christian tenures; but all estates are all portions of some manor, and all manors are held of the Sovereign under the contract at the coronation. In consistency with this polity, the church-rates are a rent charge, and the tithe a grant made at the communion table; and the advowsons and the primogeniture are part of the common as well as of the ecclesiastical law. But it is the supremacy under which this system originated, and under which it has always worked; and in America there is not, and cannot be, any laws of this nature; and a suspension, or perversion, or a weakening of this supremacy, wherever it spreads through the different branches of our laws, conveyances, customs, and even our topography, will mark the advance towards American polity. The first step will be to weaken the Establishment, whose office it is to command, under the admission of a liberal toleration. Equality of religion will be attempted, which will be found impracticable: none will be able to understand in what equality consists; and could such equality be found in theory, there would be no power sufficiently strong to maintain it, and perpetual jealousy would disturb society. Ministers will not find men in this country so indifferent to religion as they imagine them to be. A man's self-love and vanity is as much concerned in his religion as his love of God; and one or the other, or all of those principles, will be sure to move him. The standard of truth being struck down which is now set up, ministers (whoever they may be) will have no rule by which to conduct themselves; and to avoid collision and jealousies they will quickly crush the whole political machinery that unites the Church and State: thus England will be another America; and when the philosophic historian shall look back on the past, to investigate and record the process through which this revolution shall have been effected, it will be seen that it began by undermining, perverting, and destroying the supremacy of the Crown.

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ART. IV.A Manual of Councils of the Holy Catholic Church, comprising the Substance of the most Remarkable and Important Canons, alphabetically arranged. By the Rev. E. H. LANDON, M.A., late of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. London: Rivingtons, 1846.

THE councils in this "Manual" are alphabetically arranged, according to the English names of the places; the Latin names of the places are also given in a table at the end, in case the reader should not know the English name; with a second table, English and Latin; so that this is a very convenient book of reference, and it contains as much information on the questions for which the principal councils were summoned, and on the points which they endeavoured to determine, as the majority of those who have occasion for a manual would be likely to require. But we think that its value would be much increased by a preface, in which the importance of councils, and their canons for preservation of unity in the faith, should be shown; and that not only in primitive times, when simplicity of faith might seem to leave the Church more exposed to assault from being off its guard, but in after times, either when clouded with ignorance, or in the still more dangerous state of mind which is produced by scholastic subtleties, and when simple truth is no longer held in the same regard as formerly, while the heresies by which it is corrupted assume a more insidious and more dangerous form the assaults becoming the more deadly in proportion as the Church has less power to resist.

The first council upon record is that of Jerusalem, spoken of m the fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles: they met to determine a question which had been raised at Antioch, which question Paul and Barnabas, who had founded the Church in that place, and whose authority we might expect to be paramount there, were unable to determine; not that St. Paul himself had any doubt on the matter, but that certain brethren had come down from Jerusalem, professing to be in possession of the mind of the apostles and elders of the first or mother Church of all, and, as we may gather from the Epistle to the Galatians, having gained over Barnabas to their party, St. Paul was overborne by them. The only course, therefore, to be taken was, sending a deputation to Jerusalem, and bringing the whole question before an assembly of those highest in authority for their final decision.

Following on the history, we find that the decrees of the council of Jerusalem not only composed the strife which had