A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
EVERY SCHOOLBOY knows that when Mary Tudor became queen she returned England to the Papal fold and burned a great many Protestants. This is a piece of knowledge of which Roman Catholic controversialists tend to divest themselves in order to prove that the Church of England was founded by Henry VIII. A writer in the Tablet last week used this device in attacking Canon Smyth for saying in a broadcast that the Church of England is not 'a creature of the State' and that there was no severance 'from the church we were before,' the universal church to which the Church of England itself belonged.' No one would deny that the Reforation was, as Sir Maurice Powicke said, 'an act of state.' But that is a very different thing from saying that the Church of England was founded by an act of state. The Tablet trots out the familiar quotations from Maitland and Holdsworth, who showed that administratively and legally the Church in England was funda- mentally changed at the Reformation; but the crucial theo- logical points, the continuity in the essentials of faith and worship and the validity of Anglican orders cannot be disposed of by quotations from historians of law. The credentials of the Church of England really cannot be refuted in rather less than a column of the Tablet and by ignoring all the considera- tions relevant to a conclusion. This kind of propaganda causes as much distress to reflecting Roman Catholic scholars as it causes boredom and annoyance to Anglican readers.
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