Spiritual and temporal and the commons, in parliament assembled, did not only render and give unto his highness their most high and hearty thanks; but did also enact and declare all oppugners of the first to be heretics, and to be burnt with fire; and of the five last to be felons, and to suffer death. The same statute established a new and mixed jurisdiction of clergy and laity for the trial and conviction of heretics; the reigning prince being then equally intent on destroying the supremacy of the bishops of Rome, and establishing all other their corruptions of the Christian religion.

Without perplexing this detail with the various repeals and revivals of these sanguinary laws in the two succeeding reigns, let us proceed to the reign of Queen Elizabeth; when the reformation was finally established with temper and decency, unfulfilled with party-rancour, or personal caprice and resentment. By statute I Eliz. c. 1. all former statutes belonging to heresy as it stood at common law; viz. as to the infliction of common censures in the ecclesiastical courts; and in case of burning the heretic, in the provincial synod only. Sir Matthew Hale is indeed of a different opinion, and holds that such power resided in the diocesan also; though he agrees that in either case the writ de heretico comburendo was not demandable of common right, but grantable or otherwise merely at the king's direction. But the principal point now gained was, that by this statute a boundary is for the first time set to what shall be accounted heresy; nothing for the future being to be so determined, but only such tenets as have been heretofore so declared, 1. By the words of the holy scriptures; or, 2. By the first four general councils, or such others as have only used the words of the holy scriptures; or, 3. Which shall hereafter be so declared by the parliament, with the assent of the clergy in convocation. Thus was heresy reduced to a greater certainty than before; though it might not have been the worse to have defined it in terms still more precise and particular: as a man continued still liable to be burnt, for what perhaps he did not understand to be heresy, till the ecclesiastical judge so interpreted the words of the canonical scriptures.

For the writ de heretico comburendo remained still in force; and we have instances of its being put in execution upon two Anabaptists in the 17th of Elizabeth, and two Arians in the 9th of James I. But it was totally abolished, and heresy again subjected only to ecclesiastical correction, pro salute animae, by virtue of the statute 29 Car. II. c. 9.: for, in one and the same reign, our lands were delivered from the slavery of military tenures; our bodies from arbitrary imprisonment by the habeas corpus act; and our minds from the tyranny of superstitious bigotry, by demolishing this last badge of persecution in the English law.

Every thing is now as it should be, with respect to the spiritual cognizance, and spiritual punishment of heresy: unless perhaps that the crime ought to be more strictly defined, and no persecution permitted, even in the ecclesiastical courts, till the tenets in question are by proper authority previously declared to be heretical. Under these restrictions, it seems necessary for the support of the national religion, that the officers of the church should have power to censure heretics; yet not to harass them with temporal penalties, much less to exterminate or destroy them. The legislature hath indeed thought it proper, that the civil magistrate should again interpose, with regard to one species of heresy very prevalent in modern times; for by statute 9 & 10 W. III. c. 32. if any person educated in the Christian religion, or professing the same, shall by writing, printing, teaching, or advised speaking, deny any one of the persons in the Holy Trinity to be God, or maintain that there are more gods than one, he shall undergo the same penalties and incapacities which were just now mentioned to be inflicted on apostasy by the same statute.