CHAPTER XII.
A MOVEMENT OF SCHOLASTIC CATHOLICISM INAUGURATED BY THE KING. EVANGELICAL REACTION.
(Autumn, 1536.)

After Anne Boleyn's death, the men of the Reformation had taken the initiative, and Cranmer, Cromwell, Latimer, and Alesius seemed on the point of winning the prize of the contest. The intervention of a greater personage was about to turn the medal.

=HENRY PLAYS THE POPE.=

Anne's disgrace and the wedding with Jane Seymour had occupied the king with far other matters than theology. Cranmer had the field free to advance the Reformation. This was not what Henry meant; and as soon as he noticed it, he roused himself, as if from slumber, and hastened to put things in order. Though rejecting the authority of the pope, he remained faithful to his doctrines. He proceeded to act in his character as head of the Church, and resolved to fulminate a bull, as the pontiffs had done. Reginald Pole, in the book which he had addressed to him, observed that in matters touching the pope, we must not regard either his character or his life, but only his authority; and that the lapses of a pope in morals detract nothing from his infallibility in faith. Henry understood this distinction very clearly, and showed himself a pope in every way. He did not believe that there was any incompatibility between the right he claimed of taking a new wife whenever he pleased, by means of divorce or the scaffold, and that of declaring the oracles of God on contrition, justification, and ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies. The rupture of the negotiations with the protestants gave him more liberty, and even caused him a little vexation. His chagrin was not unmingled with anger, and he was not grieved to show those obstinate Germans what they gained by not accepting him. In this respect Henry was like a woman who, annoyed at being rejected by the man she prefers, gives her hand to his rival in bravado. He returned, therefore, to his theological labors. The doctors of the scholastic party spared him the pains of drawing up for himself the required articles; but he revised them and was elated at the importance of his work. 'We have in our own person taken great pain, study, labors, and travails,' he said, 'over certain articles which will establish concord in our Church.'[393] Cromwell, always submissive to his master and well knowing the cost of resistance, laid this royal labor before the upper house of Convocation. In religious matters Henry had never done anything so important. The doctrine of the authority of the prince over the dogmas of the Church now became a fact. The king's dogmatic paper, entitled Articles about religion set out by the Convocation, and published by the King's authority, bears a strong resemblance to the Exposition and the Type of Faith, published in the seventh century, during the monothelite controversy, by the emperors of Constantinople—Heraclius and Constant II. That prince, who in a political sense gave England a new impulse, sought his models as an ecclesiastical ruler, in the Lower Empire. Everybody was eager to know what doctrines the new head of the Church was going to proclaim. The partisans of Rome were doubtless quite as much surprised as the Reformers, but their astonishment was that of joy; the surprise of the evangelicals was that of fear. The vicar-general read the royal oracles aloud: 'All the words contained in the whole canon of the Bible.' he said, 'and in the three creeds—the Apostles', the Nicene, and the Athanasian—according to the interpretation which the holy approved doctors in the Church do defend,[394] shall be received and observed as the infallible words of God, so that whosoever rejects them is not a member of Christ but a member of the devil, and eternally damned.'

=ARTICLES OF RELIGION.=

That was the Romish doctrine, and Bossuet, in his examination of the royal document, appears much satisfied with the article.[395]

'The sacrament of baptism should be administered to infants, in order that they may receive the Holy Ghost and be purified of sin by its secret virtue and operation. If a man falls after baptism the sacrament of penance is necessary to his salvation; he must go to confession, ask absolution at the priest's hands, and look upon the words uttered by the confessor as the voice of God speaking out of heaven.'[396]

——'That is the whole substance of the catholic doctrine,' the partisans of Rome might urge.[397]

'Under the form of the bread and the wine are verily, substantially, and really contained the body and very blood of the Saviour which was born of the Virgin.'