[342] It was the
last act of the kind, however, in which he was permitted to indulge, and
the legislature made haste to take away such authority from hands so
incompetent to use it. From their debates upon burning the dead Tracy,
convocation were proceeding to discuss the possibility of burning the
living Latimer,[343] when they were recalled to their senses by a summons
to prepare some more reasonable answer than that which the bishops had made
for them on their privilege of making laws. Twenty more years of work were
to be lived by Latimer before they were to burn him, and their own
delinquencies were for the present of a more pressing nature. The House of
Commons at the same time proceeded to frame necessary bills on the other
points of their complaint.
The first act upon the roll recalls the Constitutions of Clarendon and the
famous quarrel between Becket and the Crown. When Catholicism was a living
belief, when ordained priests were held really and truly to possess those
awful powers which the mystery of transubstantiation assigns to them, they
were acknowledged by common consent to be an order apart from the rest of
mankind, and being spiritual men, to be amenable only to spiritual
jurisdiction. It was not intended that, if they committed crimes, they
should escape the retributive consequences of those crimes: offenders
against the law might (originally at least) be degraded, if the bishops
thought good, and stripped of their commission be delivered thus to the
secular arm.
Pages:
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313