Thus it has been said that the Reformation left the church without _discipline_; a defect which our commination-service confesses and laments; but it was one from which the Roman catholic church itself was not exempt, for the rivalry which existed between the secular and regular clergy, and again between the several orders of the latter, was, as we have seen, fatal to discipline. Still, whatever the defect was, it was not the fault of the reformers that it was suffered to remain. The canon laws were, indeed, no longer strictly applicable to the church, constructed as it now was: but an attempt was made to accommodate them, or to substitute for them such as were thought better. A code, which he called Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, was drawn up by Cranmer, consisting of fifty-one titles, with an appendix, after the manner of the Digest of Justinian. It underwent many revisions in private during the reigns of Henry and Edward, but was not produced. It was revived, with a view to its legal enactment, by the Puritans in the lower house of parliament under Elizabeth; but the Queen thought it trenched upon her supremacy, and would not hear of it. It was reprinted, and no more under Charles I., and was suggested once again to public notice by Bishop Burnet.[477] All, however, would not do; it fell to the ground; whether originally from the mere accident of the deaths of Henry and Edward before it was fully matured; whether from the difficulty of maintaining penal statutes in general in a church founded upon the principles of the Reformation; or whether, as some have thought, from the extreme severity of the code itself. That the latter circumstance was the cause of its non-enactment it is difficult to believe; for, severe as it may seem to us, and as it undoubtedly is, the distinction which is made in it between the essential and unessential doctrines of Christianity, and the exclusive application of the capital laws against heresy to the former, was the first instance of any such discrimination being exercised.[478] and may be fairly considered as a step in the progress of the principles of toleration; as the mitigation rather than the approval of penal excesses; for so little was that age prepared to revolt at the provisions laid down in it, that Bishop Jewel, who must have ranked rather with the liberal than the dogmatical party of his own day; who had lived in exile at Frankfort, a liberal school; himself, therefore, a victim of persecution; and who wrote many years after Cranmer; seems to approve the same theory of punishment, and perhaps the same scale of it; for whilst he vindicates freedom of opinion up to a certain point, still such as have a _wicked_ opinion either of God the Father, or of Christ, or of the Holy Ghost, or of any other point, of Christian religion, they being confuted by the Gospel of Christ, he would plainly pronounce detestable and damned persons, and would defy them even unto