Granting that Henry VIII. was, as Dickens said of him, "a spot of blood and grease" on the page of English history, the contemporary generation of Englishmen must have been fit subjects of such a sovereign. Every country, says Carlyle, gets as good a government as it deserves. The England of the Cromwells and the Cranmers, the Howards and the Fitzwilliams, the Wriothesleys and the Pagets, seems to have been made of baser materials than any land of which mankind has preserved a record. Roman Catholics may fairly plead that out of such a race no spiritual reform is likely to have arisen which could benefit any human soul. Of all the arguments which can be alleged for the return of England to the ancient fold, this is surely the most powerful. Yet England shows no intention of returning. History may say what it pleases, yet England remains tenacious of the liberties which were then won for us, and unconscious of the disgrace attaching to them; unconscious, also, that the version of the story which it accepts contains anything which requires explanation. The legislation of Henry VIII., his Privy Council, and his parliaments is the Magna Charta of the modern world. The Act of Appeals and the Act of Supremacy asserted the national independence, and repudiated the interference of foreign bishop, prince, or potentate within the limits of the English empire. The clergy had held for many centuries an _imperium in imperio_. Subject themselves to no law but their own, they had asserted an irresponsible jurisdiction over the souls and bodies of the people. The Act for the submission of these persons reduced them to the common condition of subjects under the control of the law. Popes were no longer allowed to dispense with ordinary obligations. Clerical privileges were abolished. The spiritual courts, with their intolerable varieties of iniquity, were swept away, or coerced within rational limits. The religious houses were suppressed, their enormous wealth was applied for the defence of the realm, and the worse than Augean dunghill of abuses was cleared out with resolute hand. These great results were accomplished in the face of papal curses, in defiance of superstitious terrors, so despicable when bravely confronted, so terrible while the spectre of supernatural power was still unexorcised; in the face, too, of earthly perils which might make stout hearts shake, of an infuriated priesthood stirring the people into rebellion, of an exasperated Catholic Europe threatening fire and sword in the name of the Pope. These were distinguished achievements, not likely to have been done at all by an infamous prince and infamous ministers; yet done so well that their work is incorporated in the constitution almost in the form in which they left it; and this mighty revolution, the greatest and most far-reaching in modern times, was accomplished without a civil war, by firmness of hand, by the action of Parliament, and a resolute enforcement of the law.