Henry did not, or perhaps could not, stop short in his course at the precise point which he would have chosen. He seems to have proposed to himself to establish a Church which, though repudiating the Pope, and separating itself from the Catholic Church of which the Pope was the head, should yet remain orthodox in doctrine and Catholic in ritual. In this he found two obstacles—first that the Pope excommunicated him, and secondly that, as remarked by Marillac in a passage already quoted, it was far from an easy task to keep men orthodox apart from the Catholic Church; and thus he was led to carry his assumption of papal power further than at that time, or for long after, the popes themselves had carried it, and in his Ten Articles first, and his Six afterwards, began to prescribe the doctrines which his people were to believe, as well as the authority to which they were to defer. That those doctrines differed comparatively little from the Catholic standard of the time, is a matter of relatively small importance. They were the doctrines of the King, not of the Church, and were enforced upon the Church in England by the authority of the State alone. Convocation, bridled by the Submission and presided over by Cromwell or Cromwell's lay deputy, could be in no sense a legitimate organ of the Church. Thus when Henry died a complete revolution had been effected in the position of the Church. Instead of the Church in England, it had become in good truth the Church of England: instead, that is, of an integral part of that great Western province of Christendom to which it owed its first conversion, and with which it had been one ever since—for nearly a thousand years—it had become, for the first time in its history, a separate Christian community, of which little could be affirmed but that, for the time being at
