Meanwhile, the same vigilant prelate supplied, as far as he had the opportunity, the livings in his gift with men devoted to the cause which he had at heart, and encouraged the more frequent delivery of sermons; whereby, though much violent collision of doctrine was produced amongst the preachers, still sparks of truth were elicited, and light, though not without heat, was dispersed.[346]
Thus stood the Reformation, when Henry, who had now done all the work which such an instrument was fit for, died, pressing in his last moments the hand of Cranmer, to whom, and to whom only, through evil report and through good report, he had ever been faithful and true. To him he bequeathed a church which was little but a ruinous heap; its revenues dissipated, its ministers divided, its doctrines unsettled, its laws obsolete, impracticable, and unadapted to the great change it had sustained.
It remains for us to trace the re-construction of these shattered materials—to watch the wise master-builders as they pursued their difficult task to its accomplishment; and beholding the pains, the perseverance, the study, the time which it cost them, to distrust the wild suggestions of an age of crude experiment and superficial knowledge—an age which would rush in without knowing why, upon forms and institutions which the sagest heads have grown gray in devising and perfecting; and rather listen, as far as regards our church, to the advice of the ancient, unpretending though it be—“Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna.”
CHAPTER X.
EDWARD VI.—ADVANCE OF THE REFORMATION.—ERASMUS’S PARAPHRASE.—HOMILIES.—CRANMER’S CATECHISM.—OFFICE OF COMMUNION.—BOOK OF COMMON-PRAYER.—TIME OF SERVICE, AND LENGTH.—PRIMER.—ARTICLES OF 1553.—MODERATION OF THE ENGLISH REFORMERS.
The accession of Edward, the Josiah of his country, as he was commonly called in his own day, reanimated the Reformation; and during his short reign it was that the church of England was constructed, in the main, such as we now see it. The young prince, who was brought up a protestant, was himself eminently calculated to recommend the cause. His own character, both mental and moral, was a most persuasive advocate of the system which had nurtured it. Cardan, who was called into England to prescribe for the Archbishop of St. Andrews, then sick of a dropsy, and was introduced to the king, now in his fifteenth year, relates the particulars of a short conversation which he had with him on the subject of comets, which won the heart of the philosopher, and, like a journal which has come down to us written in his own hand,[347] certainly argues in him a wit beyond his age. Latin he spoke, says Cardan, who seems to have conversed with him in it, as readily as himself; and in many other languages he is said to have been a proficient, stimulated, perhaps, by an apophthegm of Roger Ascham, his sister’s schoolmaster, though not his own, “that as a bird cannot soar unto heaven with one wing, so cannot a man attain unto excellence with one tongue.” Indeed, to a study of tongues, we are told by a correspondent of his own, he had more applied than to any matter either of history or of policy, the holy Scriptures excepted; nevertheless, the pains which were taken to render him in all things an accomplished prince may be seen in the questions (eighty-four in number) submitted to him by the clerk of the council, probably at the desire of the Protector Somerset; and which were intended as food for his private speculations and debates with his friends. They are such as embrace nearly all those principles of government upon which he would be afterwards called to act—“Whether is better for the commonwealth that the power be in the nobility or the people?” “How easily a weak prince with good order may long be maintained; and how soon a mighty prince with little disorder may be destroyed?” “What causeth an inheritor king to lose his realm?” “Whether religion, besides the honour of God, be not also the greatest stay of civil order?” “How dangerous it is to be the author of a new matter?”[348]—with many other problems, well worth the attention of those to whom the education of a sovereign is confided. His heart was as good as his head; and as it is with the latter that we believe, but with the former that we believe unto righteousness, so did its natural dictates rise in arms against those more subtle principles according to which Cranmer had conscientiously persuaded himself, and endeavoured to persuade the king, that the death of Joan of Kent was a duty; and happy would it have been for the memory of that otherwise almost unspotted character, had he submitted his more mature but more sophisticated judgment to the righteous tears of this gifted boy. What he did, however, he did ignorantly; not in any carnal zeal, but after long debate, and as he writes, in bitterness and sorrow of spirit.[349] He did it in the temper in which Sir Matthew Hale condemned the witches of Leostoff, and suffered judgment to be executed upon them; though he represents himself most unaffectedly, and most truly, as having in general such tenderness in cases of life as almost disqualified him for the bench; and though Sir Thomas Brown, who actually wrote against vulgar errors, was in court at the time, and influenced by his voice the verdict of the jury.[350] But in this case, Cranmer seems to have thought that the honour of Christ himself, which was blasphemed, required an example to be made; and, weak and wicked as it is now allowed to be to condemn to the flames for matters of speculative opinion, which do not directly interfere with the morals of society, and therefore do not demand the interposition of the secular magistrate, it was the dogma of the church in which Cranmer had been born and bred: from which even yet he had not wholly emancipated himself; but to which Edward, happily for himself and his country, had never been enslaved. The case of Van Paris the Dutchman is usually coupled with this of Joan Bocher; but there is no sufficient proof that Cranmer was here a party actively engaged, or that any blame is due to him, unless it be that he did not intercede for his life. It is singular, and characteristic of the force of early prejudice, that in the touching confession which Cranmer made before he went to the stake, no allusion is found to the case of this poor fanatic.
Such was the child to whose hand Providence committed the sceptre of England for a short season, “Ostendunt terris hunc tantum fata;” and accordingly the church had rest in those days. The Roman Catholic party, which had so effectually clogged the wheels of the Reformation in the latter years of Henry, did not resign their power without a struggle under Edward. From amongst the guardians of the king, who were also to be the governors of the kingdom during the minority, the Earl of Hertford, afterwards Duke of Somerset, the king’s maternal uncle, and a friend of the Reformation, was chosen head of the regency, under the title of Protector; whilst Wriothesley, the lord chancellor, a Catholic, and the leader of his sect, who opposed the elevation of Somerset, hoping that, if all the members were equal in authority, the substantial power would be his own, was deposed from his office, and deprived of the seals. Cranmer was in his own right, as primate, a member of this commission; and finding a cordial coadjutor in the Protector, he now felt himself released from the vexatious restrictions which had hitherto cramped him, and began for the first time to breathe freely. Now, therefore, his plans for restoring the national church rapidly develope themselves, and to the consideration of these our attention must for the present be directed.
It would be easy to take a more extensive sweep of contemporary history, as others have done, and to adorn our narrative with the spoils—for the stirring times here treated of, supply abundant materials for such a purpose; but it is better, perhaps, to follow our subject closely up, putting aside many collateral incidents, not, indeed, as without their influence on the Reformation, but as holding a very subordinate place in it; and thus to keep our eye single, neither distracting it by too much diversity, nor perplexing it by too much detail. For, in general, the most profitable method of treating a complicated subject, perhaps, is, not to open up every particular, great and small, which may bear upon it in its degree; but rather to filter the rush of matter which presents itself, and, striving to make a small book, which is a hard thing, instead of a large one, which is most easy, to place the reader in possession of such events only as served to stamp the times to which they belonged, or serve now to characterise them, and then to leave him to his own reflection or to his own study to fill up the picture.
The first of those successive publications, by the circulation of which Cranmer built up the faith of his country, was Erasmus’s Paraphrase of the New Testament, translated into English, a copy of which, as well as of the Bible, was to be set up in every parish church; the next, a volume of Homilies, twelve in number. The paraphrase Cranmer himself did not maintain to be perfect; but it was the best upon which he could lay his hand; moreover, as executed by a member of the church of Rome, (from whose eyes, however, the scales were fast falling,) it was calculated, he might think (and an expression which drops from him confirms this),[351] for a church in a state of transition like our own; Gardiner offered many captious objections to it; others, which might have been urged with more show of reason, he was not, perhaps, the man to discover or propound. Had he compared it with similar writings of some other of the reformers, he would have found that, in making such a choice, Cranmer, so far from intending to irritate, could only be led by a desire to conciliate the Catholics as much as might be without a compromise. Had he compared, for instance, Erasmus’s paraphrase of the Galatians with the commentary of Luther on the same epistle—had he contrasted the caution of the one interpreter with the intrepidity, not to say hardihood, of the other; the different degrees of animation with which the great evangelical doctrines, and those the most obnoxious to the Roman catholics, are respectively handled by them; the different degrees of keenness they discover in the detection of those doctrines under the same texts; the more or less reserved sense in which the works of the law are understood as affecting justification; not to speak of the direct fulminations against the church of Rome, which Luther takes every occasion to launch, and Erasmus to withhold;—if he had thus done, probably Luther’s most powerful treatise would not, indeed, have made him a convert to his opinions; Cranmer himself most likely would have disavowed, or at least tempered, several of them; but it would have at any rate satisfied him that the archbishop had far more offensive weapons in his armoury than those which he thought proper on this occasion to produce.
The objections which Gardiner directed against the Homilies were many of them just enough in logic, though feeble in themselves, for it was alleged, that the doctrines of the Homilies and of the King’s Book did not always agree; nor did they: but this only served to show (what was the truth) that, when the latter was published, Cranmer was counteracted by other influence; or else (what was equally the truth) that his own opinions had in the interval undergone considerable revision. Justification by faith only, a doctrine which in the King’s Book had been greatly qualified, is made a leading principle in the Homilies; and certain superstitions of the church of Rome, which in the former were tolerated, if not encouraged, in the latter were absolutely forbidden.[352] It may be noticed, in passing, that on some points, as on that of human corruption for instance, a tone of greater moderation prevails in this book of the Homilies than in the other, which appeared in 1562, prepared by Queen Elizabeth’s bishops, principally, it has been said, by Jewel.[353] Such a volume had been promised in an advertisement affixed to the former one; and many of the subjects actually treated in it are there enumerated, though not all: but the composition, it should seem, was reserved for those who completed the Reformation. In neither case, however, can the several Homilies be assigned to their several authors with any certainty. At the same time in the first volume (for with regard to the second no single Homily of them all has been appropriated,) there is reason to think that the one on “salvation” is Cranmer’s own; as perhaps those on “faith” and “good works;”[354] and internal evidence arising out of certain homely expressions, and peculiar forms of ejaculation, the like to which occur in Latimer’s sermons, pretty clearly betrays the hand of the Bishop of Worcester to have been engaged in the homily against “brawling and contention;” the one against “adultery” may be safely given to Thomas Becon, one of Cranmer’s chaplains, in whose works, published in 1564, it is still to be found; of the rest nothing is known but by the merest conjecture.[355] On the whole, the key to the right understanding of either volume is not the Calvinistic controversy; for amongst all the Homilies, as Bishop Burnet observes, there are none relating to the divine decrees[356]—but the horror of papal abuses, which drove the compilers into some hearty expressions in contradiction to them, particularly in those for the Nativity and Whitsunday—expressions which would rather have recommended themselves to the honest extravagance of a Latimer than to the caution of a Cranmer, and which have accordingly given occasion to many doubtful disputations both in metaphysics and theology. Still, the Homilies must have been most wholesome lessons for those times, when minor differences were merged in the broad distinction between Romanists and men of the new learning, and in the one great struggle for the liberties temporal and spiritual of the church of England.