Thus opened the Long Parliament; knowing what followed, we feel a strange interest in these quaint items extracted from State Papers and Parliamentary Journals.[2] With such ceremonies Charles I. once more sat down on the throne of his fathers; and once more, too, clothed in lawn and rochet, the prelates occupied their old benches. Great was their power: Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, might be said to discharge the functions of Prime Minister; Juxon, Bishop of London, clasped the Lord Treasurer's staff; and Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, had some years before held the great seal. They and their reverend brethren sat as co-equals with scarlet-robed and coroneted barons. They represented the stately and ancient Church of England, in closest union with the senate and the throne; suggesting, as to the relations of ecclesiastical and civil power, questions, which are as ancient as mediæval times, and as modern as our own. Thus too again the Commons' Speaker, in florid diction congratulated the monarch on the prosperity of his realms. That day can never be forgotten. Outwardly the Church, like the State, looked strong; but an earthquake was at hand, destined to overturn the foundations of both. To understand the crisis in reference to the Church we must look a little further back.[3] The Anglo-Catholic and Puritan parties stood face to face in the National Church, at the opening of the Long Parliament. They had existed from the time of the Reformation. Anglo-Catholics, while upholding with reverence the three creeds of Christendom, did not maintain any particular doctrines as distinctive of their system. Neither did they, though their peculiarities were chiefly ecclesiastical, propound any special theory of Church and State. Under Queen Elizabeth they maintained theological opinions different from those which they upheld under Charles the First. At the former period they were Calvinists. Before the civil wars they became Arminians. Preaching upon the controversy was forbidden; and Bishop Morley, on being asked "what Arminians held," wittily replied, "the best bishoprics and deaneries in England!"[4] Whereas in reference to doctrine there was change, in reference to ecclesiastical principles there was progress. The constitution of the Protestant Church of England being based on Acts of Parliament, and the supremacy of the Crown in all matters "touching spiritual or ecclesiastical jurisdiction"[5] being recognized as a fundamental principle of the Reformation--the dependence of the Church upon the civil power appeared as soon as the great ecclesiastical change took place. The Act of Uniformity in the first year of Elizabeth was passed by the lay Lords alone--all the Bishops who were present dissented--and the validity of the consecration of the first Protestant Archbishop had to be ratified by a parliamentary statute.[6]