Untitled - Rore Sanctifica

10 The Exigency of Truth.
has been unable to reduce it to subjection. It
is quite open to it to prescribe the terms on
which it will consent to submit. The United
States of America, when they had gained their
independence, might have proposed to again
come under the English crown, on condition
that all such exercises of authority as had pro
voked the rebellion should for the future be
pretermitted. The admission that the Pope has
by Divine right a primacy of order, and a
supremacy in
interpreting the Canons and
receiving appeals, by no means implies a con
cession that his present exercise of is power of
Divine right. That, for the most part, is a
matter of ecclesiastical arrangement, or, at any
rate has grown up by the concession of the go
verned. And though any of those who happen to
be under that exercise of supreme power might
be running great risks in opposing it a Voutrance,
still* that is not the position of any English
Churchman ; and therefore, without the aid of
much stronger arguments than I have ever
yet seen advanced, I should say that his duty lay
much more in the line of asking for reasonable
concessions than in giving the whole contest up,
and at once accepting as of Divine right what
he has up to that moment been opposing as
wrong. The whole thing depends upon whether
we are to regard the Primacy as one of those
fundamental truths of Christianity or as one of