their minds, though in this case in the opposite direction. They had looked on the Pope as something very like a god. In this belief they had submitted to his ceremonies and his pilgrimages, sometimes even to his exactions. Now they found that he was not a god, and they were ready naturally to conclude that he was an impostor. Whether there was at this time any great change in the feeling of the superior clergy towards Rome seems to me a more doubtful matter. That after this period the bishops were far from being hostile to or even independent of Rome, is admitted by Hook in the passage here referred to, and also stated by Creighton;[1] but the facts as here cited do not seem to bear out Dean Hook's assertion that they had been so previously. In a note on this subject in his 'Life' of Archbishop Stratford he treats it as a mere delusion of modern times to suppose that the English bishops took sides with the Pope. The Pope, he says,[2] was perpetually encroaching on the bishops' rights, and it is therefore unlikely that they should side with him. The argument is a plausible one, and may be taken for what it is worth, but it can hardly avail against the constant individual instances in which the same author mentions primate after primate as a partisan of the Pope. We may fairly argue that however much a bishop, when made, became the Pope's slave, it was mostly or very often to the Pope that he was indebted for being made a bishop at all, and the Pope was at all times almost as much the fountain of honour in the Church as the King was in the State, and with the difference in his favour that promotion in the Church was possible to a man of any nationality, and might be found in any country by the man who
