when he made his journey to Italy, in Rome itself and elsewhere. Such differences as did exist in the usages of the Church in different countries were due, no doubt, partly to the different character of the people—emphasised perhaps by the difficulty of communication and consequent rarity of intercourse between Churchmen of distant countries—and partly also to the nature and circumstances of the bargain which the Church had been able to make in each case with the State, and to the character and aim of the ruling powers of the State for the time being.
It will be said, perhaps, that some of the statements which I have now made, carry with them the implication of a considerable degree at least of freedom on the part of the Church from State control, and this is no doubt true; but then it is just because it was not national, and just so far as it was not national, that this independence existed. It would be a thing not only beyond the experience of historians but beyond the conception of political philosophers that two co-ordinate powers, such as the Church and State appeared to be in Plantagenet times, should ever have co-existed in one nation if they had both belonged to that one nation; but it was just because the Church in England was not in truth the Church of England, but was an organic portion of the one great Western Church, and able to carry on its own diplomacy and enter into its ow^n alliances, that it was enabled to occupy the position of independence, and sometimes almost of supremacy, in which we find it. It is this double position of the Church which alone makes intelligible the history of England, and indeed of most other European nations, during the centuries preceding the Reformation. The Church was at once in the nation and not of it; it formed
