died, by name Tracy.  In his last testament he had bequeathed his soul to God through the mercies of Christ, declining the mediatorial offices of the saints; and leaving no money to be expended in masses.[340] Such notorious heresy could not be passed over with impunity, and the first step of the assembled clergy[341] was to issue a commission to raise the body and burn it.  Their audacity displayed at once the power which they possessed, and the temper in which they were disposed to use it.  The Archbishop of Canterbury seems to have been responsible for this monstrous order, which unfortunately was carried into execution before Henry had time to interfere.[342] It was the last act of the kind, however, in which he was permitted to indulge, and the legislature made haste to take away such authority from hands so incompetent to use it.  From their debates upon burning the dead Tracy, convocation were proceeding to discuss the possibility of burning the living Latimer,[343] when they were recalled to their senses by a summons to prepare some more reasonable answer than that which the bishops had made for them on their privilege of making laws.  Twenty more years of work were to be lived by Latimer before they were to burn him, and their own delinquencies were for the present of a more pressing nature.  The House of Commons at the same time proceeded to frame necessary bills on the other points of their complaint.

The first act upon the roll recalls the Constitutions of Clarendon and the famous quarrel between Becket and the Crown.  When Catholicism was a living belief, when ordained priests were held really and truly to possess those awful powers which the mystery of transubstantiation assigns to them, they were acknowledged by common consent to be an order apart from the rest of mankind, and being spiritual men, to be amenable only to spiritual jurisdiction.  It was not intended that, if they committed crimes, they should escape the retributive consequences of those crimes:  offenders against the law might (originally at least) be degraded, if the bishops thought good, and stripped of their commission be delivered thus to the secular arm.  But the more appropriate punishment for such persons was of a more awful kind, proportioned to the magnitude of the fault; and was conveyed or held to be conveyed in the infliction of the spiritual death of excommunication.  Excommunication was, in real earnest, the death of the soul, at a time when communion with the church was the only means by which the soul could be made partaker of the divine life; and it was a noble thing to believe that there was something worse for a man than legal penalties on his person or on his mortal body; it was beautiful to recognise in an active living form, that the heaviest ill which could befall a man was to be cut off from God.  But it is only for periods that humanity can endure the atmosphere of these high altitudes of morality.  The early Christians attempted a community of goods,