--- title: Times and Seasons description: Issues of 1845 to 1846. authors: - Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints editors: - Ebenezer Robinson - Don Carlos Smith - Smith, Joseph, Jr. - Taylor, John collections: - periodicals tags: - newspaper - times-and-seasons - nauvoo - nineteenth-century periodical: Times and Seasons volume: 6 number: 8 published: 1845-05-01 publisher: E. Robinson and D. C. Smith; later John Taylor publisher_place: Commerce and Nauvoo, Illinois language: en type: article reference: "“The Church of England,” *Times and Seasons* 6, no. 8 (May 1, 1845): 886–887." printed_title: THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. source: url: https://archive.org/details/per_utah-and-the-mormons_times-and-seasons_1845-05-01_6_8 transcription: Text from the Centerplace.org transcription (https://www.centerplace.org/history/ts/v6n08.htm), with its page breaks; this Internet Archive scan is the reference copy (its OCR was used only as a witness for OCR repair) identifier: per_utah-and-the-mormons_times-and-seasons_1845-05-01_6_8 start_page: 886 end_page: 887 curator_note: A Mormon newspaper published by the church in Nauvoo; included for historical study. Inclusion does not imply endorsement. rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1845 (Nauvoo, Illinois); published before 1931, so public domain in the United States source: https://archive.org/details/per_utah-and-the-mormons_times-and-seasons_1845-05-01_6_8 publication_year: 1845 --- # The Church of England As all men are not equally learned, we take a small extract from the "Book of Denominations," to show how the now prevailing church of England, first came into existence. We live in a day of investigation and trouble, and, to be right, needs investigation, care, and even revelation. The extract reads thus. "Perhaps there is no church upon earth whose doctrines and constitution are so little understood by the majority of its members as the united church of England and Ireland.-The leading facts in its history are indeed generally known, but what it really believes and teaches, how far it is ecclesiastical and how far secular, and how the one interferes with the other, and how strangely they are frequently amalgamated, to the deterioration of religion and the best interests of the community, very few indeed are competent to determine. The antiquity claimed for the church by a few of its more zealous advocates, on account of some fancied and mysterious connexion [connection] which they pretend to discover subsisting between it and a church more ancient than that of Rome, and purely apostolic in its character, is perfectly ludicrous. Every vestige of such a church vanished before the missionaries of the pope at a very early period of our ecclesiastical history, and at the Reformation there was no church in Christendom that was more entirely popish, tyrannical, and corrupt, than the church of England. It is said there is no royal road to geometry-but Henry VII, soon convinced the pope and the nation, that he had discovered a truly royal method of effecting the reformation of religion. It was not by a slow process of instruction, not even by writing a treatise in its favor, as he had once done in opposition to its mightiest champion; his own sovereign dictum achieved in an hour what Wickliffe, and Ridley, and Cranmer might have attempted in vain for a century. Not that there was anything resembling a true and scriptural reformation, effecting by the violent and arbitrary changes which Henry introduced into the Anglican church. Those changes were favorable to the diffusion of evangelical light, and the reformers availed themselves of the opportunity thus afforded them, to imbue the mind of the nation with protestant principles; but Henry was as much a papist as a protestant, persecuted both with equal severity, and had nothing at heart in the zeal which he affected for religion, but humbling the pontiff, and gratifying his own avarice and ambition by seizing the ecclesiastical revenues, and constituting himself instead of his Holiness the Supreme Head of the Church. The clergy was alarmed, and whispered the curses they did not dare to formulate. Henry laughed at their terrors;-despised their combinations, and with an atrocious gaiety, perfectly harmonizing with the general brutality of his character cooly [coolly] said, "I will betake me to their temporalities." He was as good as his word; and it would have been well had he confined himself to the spoilation of monastic and other ecclesiastical revenues. What she lost in wealth, the church might have gained in virtue; and if her mitres and her thrones had been trampled in the dust, her bishops would probably have been wiser and better men, and the successors of the fishermen of Galilee, in emulating the poverty, might have attained to the spirituality of apostolic times. But Henry was resolved to continue the hierarchy in all the wealth and splendor which was compatible with its subserviency [subservience] to his own authority; but to prove to the whole world that, as "Defender of the Faith," he could construct a creed as well as depose the pope, he proceeded to fabricate with all his royal diligence and skill, a summary of Christian doctrine, the most essential article of which, however, seems to have been his own supremacy; for whoever denied this, whether protestant or papist, was sure to suffer in its most appalling form. History may record Henry as the first layman, who took to himself in the ecclesiastical sense of the expression, the title of "Supreme Head of the Church," and which he was not long in realizing; for he forthwith enjoined all preachers to instruct the people to believe the whole Bible, the three creeds, the Apostle's the Nicene and Athanasian, and to interpret all things according to them!" We shall endeavor to continue these extracts, as far the way of truth may need to show the "old paths," and when and where "the ordinances were changed."