weight of ecclesiastical oppression thus removed was CHAP. III. great, and the people no doubt began to breathe anew, though many of the more thoughtful felt that it became them to rejoice with trembling. For this famous parliament, after all that it had done, remained in its own estimation Catholic. The king, too, boasted of being still a Catholic; and the nation was to remain Catholic, in regard at least to religious doctrine, even when thus wholly separated from the great centre of the Catholic system. In In 1529, the year in which this parliament was convened, Henry issued a proclamation, in which eighty-five works, the productions of English or Continental reformers, from Wycliffe downwards, were condemned under their respective titles. In the following year, a Protestant named Bayfield was burnt in Smithfield, because he had been bravely zealous in importing and distributing such books.*

testant party

among the

But the fact that there were so many publications of But a Proa reforming tendency to suppress, and that it was deemed grows up expedient to adopt such measures to suppress them, people. suggest that the religious thought of the nation must have been greatly moved. The degree in which the king had himself favoured the new learning, especially by the encouragement given to the labours of Erasmus; the translation of the Scriptures into English, and the placing of copies of the entire Bible in all churches, to be read by all people; the free use of many admirable prayers in the mother tongue; the distribution of a vast number of books, licensed and unlicensed, full of Protestant ideas-ideas which could not fail to awaken

Petition of the Commons, MS. Rolls Office. Parliamentary Hist. i. 501, et seq. Herbert's Henry VIII. Revolutions in English History, ii. 150-174.

BOOK I. impulses which would find their vent in much utterance and action-all had so influenced the nation, as to have made it certain that the half-way reformation of the king could never satisfy it.

On the accession of Edward VI. came one of those transitions from a time of persecution to comparative rest, which remind us of similar fluctuations in the experience of the early Church. The reign of the Six Articles, which disgraced the later years of Henry VIII., sent Protestants to the stake as heretics one day, and Romish priests to the gallows as traitors the next. But under the alternations of stimulus and restraint on the part of the Government, pious youth grew up with a martyr temper in them at Oxford. The devout Bilney, fragile in body, timid in soul, but possessed with a conscientiousness which made the fragile strong, and the timid brave, became a spiritual power in Cambridge. In Latimer, one of his many converts, we see the great preacher of the age-a man who gains the attention of all ears by his racy Saxon speech; charms all imaginations by his homebred and pictorial illustrations; and reaches nearly all consciences by his honest presentation of the realities of things, and his bold exposure of all shams. During many years Bilney and Latimer were Protestants without knowing it; and through the influence of such men a large portion of the nation became possessed with religious feeling, the ultimate tendencies of which few could see, and fewer still dared to avow. Tyndale had said, that he would cause the English mechanic to be better skilled in the knowledge of the New Testament than the modern priest; and by giving that book in English to his countrymen he fulfilled his pledge. In that act he saw the fruit of his life of

poverty and homelessness, of toil and danger; and that CHAP. III. work done, he surrendered himself to his martyr death. So under Henry the seed of the kingdom was to be widely sown, either secretly or openly, and the harvest time was to follow.

formation

Established Protestantism, as denoting a scheme of The Redoctrine as well as a scheme of polity, dates from the under Edaccession of Edward VI. Cranmer, sustained by the ward VI. protector, and by the Protestant party in the council, arranged that an ecclesiastical visitation should take place through the whole kingdom. The visitors for each circuit consisted of two gentlemen, together with a civilian, a divine, and a registrar. The articles of instruction given them required that the wholesome proclamations of the late king against the pretensions of the Bishop of Rome, and in discouragement of superstition, should be republished; that all images to which pilgrimages were made, or offerings presented, should be removed; that the epistles and gospels read at high mass should be in English; that the litany used in processions should also be in English, as commanded by his Majesty's royal father; that on every Sunday and holiday a chapter should be read in English out of the New Testament at matins, and out of the Old Testament at evening song; that holidays, which were designed to promote devotion, but had become the occasion of all kinds of dissoluteness, should be made seasons for reading the Scriptures, for attending prayer and the communion, and for offices of charity; that the people should be taught to respect all ceremonies not abrogated by authority, and to reverence priests for their works' sake; and that prayer should still be offered for departed souls. But the great innovation in this stage

BOOK I. of proceedings consisted in the publication of Cranmer's Book of Homilies, and in the place assigned in the means of popular instruction to the paraphrase on the New Testament by Erasmus. The Homilies were to be read by all preachers. An English translation of the work by Erasmus was to be placed in all churches, that it might be read by all persons disposed to read it. These publications were charged with the seeds of Protestant theology greatly beyond anything found in the standards of doctrine hitherto sanctioned by the English government. Parliament, when assembled, confirmed all that had been done. It provided further, that the cup should be restored to the laity in the communion, and that an end should be put to private

The first Book of Common Prayer.

The doc

Eucharist.

masses.*

The great event, however, in ecclesiastical affairs at this juncture was still to come. This consisted in the instructions given to a commission of learned men to revise the forms of public worship generally. To these commissioners we owe the first Book of Common Prayer designed to be in harmony with the tenets of Protestantism and published in English. Parliament and the two houses of convocation gave their sanction to the new Liturgy. An act was also passed which allowed the clergy to marry. But the bill on that point did not become law without considerable opposition.†

One of the great difficulties in respect to the Book of trine of the Common Prayer, related to what should be its teaching concerning the Eucharist. Peter Martyr in Oxford, and Bucer in Cambridge, were parties to public discussions

* Burnet's Hist. Ref. iii. 16, et seq. Strype's Eccles. Mem. ii., and Life of Cranmer. Statutes Ed. VI. cc. 1, 2, 12.

+ Burnet, iii. 131. Statutes 1 Ed. VI. 1, 2, 12.

on that subject. The doctrine of the Church of Eng- CHAP. III. land, as then settled, and as it is at present, is in some degree peculiar. Three conceptions in regard to the Lord's Supper were at that time prevalent. Opposed to the Transubstantiation doctrine was Luther's Consubstantiation, and the more intelligible doctrine of Zwinglius, which accounted the bread and wine as the signs of a spiritual presence, and nothing more. The doctrine of Peter Martyr is not distinguishable from that of Zwinglius. Bucer discoursed somewhat more mystically on the subject, leaving by the obscurity-and apparently the designed obscurity-of his language, room for some notion as to a kind of presence called a real presence, though in what that reality consists his words do not at all enable us to determine. His influence on this question was not a purely good influence. However, in the Articles of Religion, published by authority during this reign, and in the Prayer Book itself as left by Edward, nothing like the doctrine of Transubstantiation was allowed to have place. The Prayer Book, as sanctioned by convocation in the second year of Edward VI., differed in arrangement more than in substance from that now in use. The difference, however, was not inconsiderable. The address to the Virgin Mary, and similar invocations to the angels and the patriarchs, which Henry had allowed to remain, were omitted. But, on the other hand, water was mixed with the wine. The sign of the cross was retained in the Eucharist, in Confirmation, and in the Visitation of the Sick. Baptism was by triple immersion, and was accompanied by exorcising and anointing. In the Burial Service, prayer was offered for the deceased person.

*Strype's Eccles. Mem. ii. Cranmer, cc. 13, 14. Collier, ii. 309, 310.