The Catholic church naturally resisted its disintegration, and the
severance was effected by the secular arms of parliament and the crown.
The nationalism of the English church was the result rather than the
cause of the breach with Rome, and its national characteristics--
supreme governance by the king, the disappearance of cosmopolitan
religious orders, the parliamentary authorization of services in the
vernacular, of English books of Common Prayer, of English versions of
the Bible, and of the Thirty-nine Articles--were all imposed by
parliament after, and not adopted by the church before, the separation.
There were, indeed, no legal means by which the church in England could
have accomplished these things for itself; there were the convocations
of Canterbury and York, but these were two subordinate provinces of the
Catholic church; and, whatever may be said for provincial autonomy in
the medieval church, the only marks of national autonomy were stamped
upon it by the state. York was more independent of Canterbury than
Canterbury was of Rome; and the unity as well as the independence of
the national church depends upon the common subjection of both its
provinces to the crown. This predominance of state over church was a
consequence of its nationalization; for where the boundaries of the two
coincide, the state generally has the upper hand. The papacy was only
made possible by the fall of the Western Empire; in the Eastern Empire
the state, so long as it survived, controlled the church; and the
independence of the medieval church was due to its catholicity, while
the state at best was only national.
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