vested in him; and being, as he called himself, the Father of Christendom, the nation thought themselves entitled to call upon him to make use of that power.  A resource of the kind must exist somewhere—­the relation between princes and subjects indispensably requiring it.  It had been vested in the Bishop of Rome, because it had been presumed that the sanctity of his office would secure an impartial exercise of his authority.  And unless he could have shown (which he never attempted to show) that the circumstances of the succession were not so precarious as to call for his interference, it would seem that the express contingency had arisen which was contemplated in the constitution of the canon law;[134] and that where a provision had been made by the church of which he was the earthly head, for difficulties of this precise description, the pope was under an obligation either to make the required concessions in virtue of his faculty, or, if he found himself unable to make those concessions, to offer some distinct explanation of his refusal.  I speak of the question as nakedly political.  I am not considering the private injuries of which Catherine had so deep a right to complain, nor the complications subsequently raised on the original validity of the first marriage.  A political difficulty, on which alone he was bound to give sentence, was laid before the pope in his judicial capacity, in the name of the nation; and the painful features which the process afterwards assumed are due wholly to his original weakness and vacillation.

Deeply, however, as we must all deplore the scandal and suffering which were occasioned by the dispute, it was in a high degree fortunate, that at the crisis of public dissatisfaction in England with the condition of the church, especially in the conduct of its courts of justice, a cause should have arisen which tested the whole question of church authority in its highest form; where the dispute between the laity and the ecclesiastics was represented in a process in which the pope sat as judge; in which the king was the appellant, and the most vital interests of the nation were at stake upon the issue.  It was no accident which connected a suit for divorce with the reformation of religion.  The ecclesiastical jurisdiction was upon its trial, and the future relations of church and state depended upon the pope’s conduct in a matter which no technical skill was required to decide, but only the moral virtues of probity and courage.  The time had been when the clergy feared only to be unjust, and when the functions of judges might safely be entrusted to them.  The small iniquities of the consistory courts had shaken the popular faith in the continued operation of such a fear; and the experience of an Alexander VI., a Julius II., and a Leo X. had induced a suspicion that even in the highest quarters justice had ceased to be much considered.  It remained for Clement VII. to disabuse men of their alarms, or by confirming them to forfeit for ever the supremacy