“Let the Church be free and hold her rights and liberties inviolate.” Disregarding this opening dictum of England's time-honoured Magna Charta, Henry VIII stamped Erastianism lastingly upon the Church of England. By three epoch-making Acts of parliament, the second Tudor monarch established the judicial, legislative, and appointive supremacy of the crown in ecclesiastical affairs. Since his time the Church of England has known no hour of complete ecclesiastical autonomy. In recent years the Prayer Book controversy has brought this arresting circumstance clearly to the light. What is more important about a church than its Prayer Book. its forms of worship, its articles of faith, its liturgies? Yet in 1927 and again 1928 the world witnessed the strange spectacle of a British House of Commons comprising men of every faith, Roman Chatolic, Protestant, Christian Scientist, and even the Parsee Communist, Shapurji Saklatvala, carefully weighing and sifting theological niceties and in a single spectacular debate decisively rejecting the overwhelming opinion of the church courts, diocesan, provinical, and national.
