But it has no inherent spiritual power as such, nor ecclesiastical authority, whatsoever, the spirituality alone possessing the power of the Keys." * Lord Selborne the learned and eminent Lord High Chancellor in Mr. Gladstone's late Government says, " The Sovereign has not (as some suppose) a temporal supremacy in temj)oral things and a spiritual supremacy in spiritual things; it is one undivided temj)(>ral supremacy, extending to all persons, causes, and things, whether ecclesiastical or civil, of which the law of the land takes cognizance, and ujjon which that law has

* Fuller's Appellate Jurisdiction of the Crown, 186.

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

operation. It does not and it can not extend to tiie province of religious belief, or to moral and spiritual obligations recognized by the conscience as springing from a source higher than the laws of the land." ' That most eloquent and able prelate, Wilberforce Bishop of Winchester, when Bishop of Oxford, in a debate in the House of Lords, in which this subject was brought up, thus spoke out : -- " he did not believe that it was a correct or constitutional interpretation of that supremacy, to say that the occupant of the throne should settle in his or her individual capacity, articles of faith or any other questions whatever. He was sure that the exalted personage who at present occupied the throne would be herself the first to repudiate so unconstitutional a doctrine. The Supremacy of the Crown meant nothing more than this, that the Crown had the ultimate Appeal in all questions ecclesiastical and civil, deciding such questions not of herself, but through her proper constitutional agents." And Mr. Gladstone himself writes, in his Letter on the R.oyal Supremacy ; -- I contend that the Crown did not claim by statute, either to be by right, or to become by convention, the source of that Kind of action which was committed by the Saviour to the Apostolic church, whether for the enactment of laws or for the administration of its discipline ; but the claim was that all the canons of the church, and all its judicial proceedings, inasmuch as they were to form parts respectively of the laws and the administration of justice in the Kingdom, should run only with the assent and Sanction of the Crown."