But he argued that once the Convocation had met, it could, like Parliament, debate all questions relevant to its purpose.

"The one of these courts," said Shower, "is of the same power and use with regard to the Church as the other is in respect to the State," and he insisted that the writ of summons could not at any point confine debate.

And since the Convocation was an ecclesiastical Parliament, it followed that it could legislate and thus make any canons "provided they do not impugn common law, statutes, customs or prerogative." "To confer, debate and resolve," said Shower, "without the king's license, is at common law the undoubted right of convocation." Here was a clear challenge which was at once answered, in _The Authority of Christian Princes_, by William Wake, who was by far the most learned of the latitudinarian clergy, and the successor of Tenison in the see of Canterbury.

His argument was purely historical.

He endeavored to show that the right to summon ecclesiastical synods was always the prerogative of the early Christian princes until the aggression of the popes had won church independence.