Docility to lay dictation has always been the test by which the Anglican clergy have been sifted from Catholics and Puritans. To the imaginative mind a faith must spring from a revelation, and a revelation must be infallible and unchangeable. Truth must be single. Catholics believed their revelation to be continuous, delivered through the mouth of an illuminated priesthood, speaking in its corporate capacity. Puritans held that theirs had been made once for all, and was contained in a book. But both Catholics and Puritans were clear that divine truth was immutable, and that the universal Church could not err. To minds of this type, statutes regulating the appearance of God’s body in the elements were not only impious but absurd, and men of the priestly temperament, whether Catholic or Puritan, have faced death in its most appalling forms, rather than bow down before them. Here Fisher and Knox, Bellarmine and Calvin, agreed. Rather than accept the royal supremacy, the flower of the English priesthood sought poverty and exile, the scaffold and the stake. For this, the aged Fisher hastened to the block on Tower Hill; for this, Forest dangled over the embers of the smouldering rood; for this, the Carthusians rotted in their noisome dens. Nor were Puritans a whit behind Catholics in asserting the sacerdotal dignity; “Erant enim blasphemi qui vocarent eum [Henricum VIII.] summum caput ecclesiæ sub Christo,” wrote Calvin, and on this ground the Nonconformists fought the established Church, from Elizabeth’s accession downward. The writings of Martin Marprelate only restated an issue which had been raised by Hildebrand five hundred years before; for the advance of centralization had reproduced in England something of the same conditions which prevailed at Constantinople when it became a centre of exchanges. Wherever civilization has reached the point at which energy expresses itself through money, faith must be subordinate to the representative of wealth. Stephen Gardiner understood the conditions under which he lived, and accepted his servitude in consideration of the great See of Winchester. With striking acuteness he cited Justinian as a precedent for Henry:-- “Then, Sir, who did ever disallow Justinian’s fact, that made laws concerning the glorious Trinity, and the Catholic faith, of bishops, of men, of the clergy, of heretics, and others, such like?”[289] From the day of the breach with Rome, the British priesthood sank into wage-earners, and those of the ancient clergy who remained in the Anglican hierarchy after the Reformation, acquiesced in their position, as appeared in all their writings, but in none, perhaps, more strikingly than in the Formularies of Faith of Henry VIII., where the episcopal bench submitted their views of orthodoxy to the revision of the secular power:--