Henry threw off his allegiance to the Pope, and had himself acknowledged by Parliament as the supreme head of the English Church. Powerful, unscrupulous, and popular, he confiscated church revenues, broke up monasteries, and by Act of Parliament, in 1537, completed politically the English Reformation. It was, so far as the King was concerned, a reformation only in name, for as to liberty of conscience, and the right of private judgment, he was as arrogant a bigot as any pope who ever wore the tiara. He vacillated in his own opinions, but enforced those he held at the time by such severe enactments, that many persons of both religions were burned as heretics. And from the Anglican Church, so founded on despotism and intolerance, can we wonder that the shadow of Rome has never been thoroughly lifted? In the abstract it is essentially a close corporation of ecclesiastics, the mere people hardly counting as a necessary factor. Its sacraments have still miraculous or supernatural properties attached to them; no one must officiate therein who has not been _ordained_, and the assumed powers of ordination came through the Romish Church. From the older Church it adopted certain creeds, as dogmatic in their assertions, and intolerant in their fulminations, as were ever Papal Bulls or Decrees of Councils. Of course the mellowing influence of time, the broadening thoughts of later years, and the rivalship of Nonconformity, have done much to take out old stings and deaden old intolerance; whilst a cloud of witnesses for righteousness and progress in the Church itself, have raised it above its old self, and brought it in nearer touch with the spirit of the present age. * * * * * The history of the Scottish Reformation is an entirely different one. Instead of being originated and fostered by State authority, it was a fierce and obstinate battle with such authority. Scotland was then under one of its disastrous regencies, that of Mary of Guise, the widow of King James V., acting for her infant daughter Mary, known afterwards in history as the beautiful and unfortunate Queen of Scots. The Reformation in England had sent a wave of agitation into Scotland, and this wave advanced strongly as refugees from the cruel persecutions of Mary Tudor flocked into the Northern Kingdom; and as the Regent, with her coadjutor, the bigoted and relentless Cardinal Beaton, also began to persecute the new faith, and send its adherents to the stake; for it has ever been found to be a true saying, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” In revenge for the burning, in 1545, of one of the saintliest of men, George Wishart, a party of the Reformers murdered the Cardinal in his own castle of St. Andrews, from one of the windows of which he had gloated over the martyr’s cruel death.