recently been filling some of the highest administrative and executive offices under the Crown, and holding places in diplomacy. In an early stage of the Reformation, the mitred abbots had been dropped out of the upper house of Parliament. While they were in it, they, with the twenty-one “Lord Bishops,” preponderated over the temporal peers. As their exclusion weakened the ecclesiastical power in the government, the prelates who remained seemed to believe and to act as if it fell to them to represent and exercise the full prerogative of sway which had belonged to the old hierarchy. Very marked is the new phase assumed by the spirit and course of the Nonconformists under this changed aspect of the controversy. The Puritans had begun by objecting and protesting against certain usages; they now set themselves resolutely against the authority of those who enforced such usages. To a great extent, the Roman Catholic prelates on those parts of the Continent where the Reformation established itself, deserted their sees. This left the way clear in those places for a church polity independent of prelacy. The retention of their sees and functions by the English bishops, and the addition to their number by the consecration of others as selected by the Crown, thus made the struggle which the Puritans maintained in England quite unlike that of their sympathizers on the Continent. The issue thus raised on the single question of the Divine right and the apostolic authority and succession of bishops was continuously in agitation through the whole contention maintained by Dissenters. In other elements of it, the controversy exhibited changing phases, as the process of the reform seemed at intervals to be advanced or impeded, while the kingdom, as we have noted, was pulsating between the old and the new _régime_,—as Henry VIII. and his three children, in their succession to his throne, sought to modify, to arrest, or to limit it. The distribution among the people of the Scriptures in the English tongue was favored and brought about by Thomas Cromwell and Cranmer. The privilege, however, was soon revoked, as the people were thus helped to take the matter of religion into their own hands. The mother tongue was first used in worship with the translated litany in 1542, which was revised in 1549. The new prayer-book, canons, and homilies were brought into use. It was by royal authority, and not either by Convocation or Parliament, that the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion were imposed. On Elizabeth’s accession there were nine thousand four hundred priests in England. About two hundred of these abandoned their posts rather than comply with the conditions exacted by the stage in innovation already reached. The more pronounced champions of the Church of England are earnest in pleading that the rupture with Rome was not the act of the King, but of what might be called the Church itself. The as yet unreformed bishops, we are told, had in Convocation, in 1531,