should exclude whatever lay beyond it, but only secured (as far as she could) certain prominent points, on which error had existed. But these, as a particular church, she laid down only in dependence upon, and subordination to, not to supersede the Church Catholic. Cranmer himself shared, in a great degree, the difficulty which men of those days must have had, in arriving at any definite or ascertained results at all: one who has been even compelled to part with a portion of his belief, has shaken the hold of the remainder and even though the needle should be endued with a power, not its own, to fix at last on the centre where it should rest, yet, should it have been necessary once violently to shake it, it will not be until after much vehement vibration to the right and to the left, that it will at last tremblingly fix itself. It is not in the midst of conflict, while men are struggling for their footing and for life, that we are to expect a calm survey of the nature of the ground whereon they stand. All the Reformers (as was to be expected) vacillated, English and foreign (save, perhaps, Ridley, who was most imbued with the doctrines of the early Church, and had therein a firm resting place); and they who ventured to systematize most, as Calvin, went most astray; others, as Luther, in whatever proportion they did so. Their province was, to clear the building of its untempered mortar; it was to be the task of others to point the edges, which, in this rough handling, were of necessity injured, and to restore the fair harmony and finish of the goodly building. It is difficult, at any time, to oppose even an error broadly, without impairing some neighbouring truth out of which it was corrupted, or to which it is akin; this has been miserably evidenced again and again in individual controversy with heretics; the insulated defender of truth against heresy, himself steps on the other side beyond the Catholic Verities, and becomes a heretic: every error, almost, in these latter divided times, is the depository of some kindred truth, and rough censures of what is untrue fail not to include what is true also; thus, in refuting men who depreciated the ordained sacraments, men, in their turn came to depreciate or deny unquestionable (although mis-stated) Divine agency, and explain GoD's miraculous work ing in the conversion of a single soul, or the refreshing of His Church, by mere secondary causes: on the other hand, in correcting false notions of the Sacraments, they lost the true; in refuting Transubstantiation, they fell short of the truth of the real mystical, spiritual, presence of CHRIST in the Eucharist; the mind, intent upon the one side of removing injurious error, misses or forgets to establish, or does not discriminate, the positive truth. The Divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had different offices; in the sixteenth, we are to look for strong broad statements of truths, which had been obscured by Popery, but often without the modifications which they require and receive from other portions of the Gospel; in the seventeenth, we have the calmer, deeper statements of men, to whom God had given peace from the first conflict, yet suffered not their arms to rust, having "left" certain of "the nations to prove Israel by them, even as many of Israel as had not known the wars of Canaan" (Judges iii. 1). Yet their office was to maintain, not to win, and so was a calmer duty; and they, however exercised by troubles, still breathed freely amid the "arva serena," which their fathers had won with their own blood. They had not to rise and take possession of the land, while "blood and fire ran in mingled stream '," but "to keep the watch of the LORD by His holy temple and by the altar, every man with his weapon in his hand." (2 Chron. xxiii.) There is then no occasion to institute any comparison between the relative value of these several "vessels meet for the Master's use" in the House of GOD; between those who here first laboured, and those who, when these were at rest, entered into their labours. Each had their several offices, and were severally qualified for them; and they only risk disparaging the Reformers of the sixteenth century who would look to them for that which was not their office, viz. a well-proportioned and equable exhibition of the several parts of the Catholic Faith, which was, in the appointed order of things, rather reserved for the seventeenth. 1 Christian Year. 20 Cranmer's vacillations, and yet greater, natural in those times. It was, then, natural that Cranmer should vacillate, and that the more as to the doctrine of the Eucharist, since he had arrived at the Catholic views, through the aid of Ridley, and contrary perhaps to his own bias. We blame him then not for this, rather should one abstain from rudely blaming those, who vacillated most, and even for a while, or altogether, returned to Rome. It was not necessarily for interest that men so vacillated; the excesses of many foreign Protestants must needs have startled many of the gentler sort, who yet wished to be freed from the grosser corruptions of Rome, as they do at this day; and if Cranmer, pledged as he was, could recant, and retracted not, while there was yet hope, one need not impute worse motives than undue fear of man to others. GoD, for His own Name's sake, rescued His servant Cranmer, and gave him to suffer willingly what he had shrunk from; Jewel's recantation was blotted out only by bitter tears, and a life of fasting and humiliation : why then ascribe sordid motives to others, who, halting between two opinions, were dissatisfied perhaps both with the corruptions of Rome and those of the Reformation under Edward VI., and so took part with neither, but held a middle course, leaning first on the one side, then on the other? Such persons are not to be hastily blamed; unless indeed they put themselves in the office of leaders of the LORD's host, for which they are not fitted; to the people, it was wont to be proclaimed in the wars of the LORD, "What man is fearful and faint-hearted? let him go and return unto his house!" (Deut. xx. 8.) Stirring times must be times of fear. What, however, is to be blamed in Cranmer is, that one, from his own yieldingness unfitted for the task, should have undertaken so mighty a work as that of uniting the discordant elements of Protestantism in one Episcopal body. A splendid conception truly; but not to be encompassed by such an instrument! No great principles put forward; private and discordant opinions not repressed by an appeal to the agreement of Catholic antiquity, which had been the Anglican touchstone in Romish controversy; the peculiar advantages of the Anglican reformation abandoned; and instead thereof, a mere attempt at comprehension by the use of vague and indistinct terms, "which might be taken in a larger Comprehension the result of fixed principles, not of vague terms. 27 acceptation," but which, as Melanchthon saw, were but a source of increased contention to posterity'. Cranmer thus aggravated the difficulties of his own waveringness; and entailed upon himself trials, which God had not annexed to his office, fell into a snare, and brought the elements of confusion into our Church. As also he began the design, not in unison with the Church, but in concert with foreigners or the State alone, so he seems to have continued it single-handed; the body of the clergy do not appear even 1 Cranmer wished to unite the reformations of England, Germany, France, Geneva, and Zurich, i. e. the Fathers, Luther, Beza, Calvin, and Zuingli, in one. Melanchthon approved Cranmer's plan generally, "to publish a true and clear "confession of the whole body of Christian doctrine, according to the judgment "of learned men, whose names should be subscribed thereto. He thought this "confession should be much of the nature of their confession at Augsburg; only "that some few points in controversy might be in plainer words delivered, than was "in that." (Ep. 66. L. 1. ap. Strype, Cranmer, b. 3. c. 24.) This last admission is the more remarkable, in that it was the policy of his followers in Germany to render that Confession more ambiguous, so that it might comprehend persons yet more at variance with one another, instead of guiding them in one way. They went on veiling differences of opinion under ambiguity of expression, until it proved their destruction. As people came to look upon Articles as a test, instead of a guide, they first sacrified their primary use as " a confession of faith," and then dreaded their effects, for the very purpose to which they had turned them, and wished to relax them, and make them more indefinite (thus destroying their use in teaching), for fear that, as tests, they should be too restricted. P. Martyr agreed with Melanchthon, but on the opposite, the Zuinglian, side; so that here, for this plan of union, there were already two opposed parties wishing their own views to be fully and precisely expressed. This was impossible; but Bucer and Cranmer took a line equally impracticable, to conciliate parties by "using more dark and ambiguous forms of speech, that might be taken in a larger acceptation." (Strype, ib. p. 408.) This was in 1548. Edward VIth's Articles (1552) which seem to have been carried through by the Archbishop in connection with the State, in conjunction perhaps with some selected Commission, but which were never submitted to the Church at large (Strype's Cranmer, 11, 27, 34. Heylyn, p. 121) -these Articles are a fruit of this policy, and have two faces, one to be presented to those abroad, who could not as yet come up to the high doctrine; the other to be followed out at home, with reference to the teaching of the Church Catholic. Unhappily, but as was natural, they have been too often followed out into Zuinglianism, which they were intended to bring over to the Church. (On this negociation with Melanchthon and Calvin, see Strype's Cranmer, b. 3, c. 24 and 25. Of Calvin's strong interference with our reformation, Heylyn speaks, p. 80, 107.) : to have been consulted about it; the other Commissioners were (although nothing is known certainly) very probably joined in this office of revision, but the majority unquestionably misliked it as the scheme of comprehension was Cranmer's only, so the responsibility of veiling or lowering the doctrine is only his. And again, in the Articles of Edward VI., of which he acknowledged himself the writer, and which were composed about the same time, there is, in those relating to the Sacraments, the like tendency to Zuinglianism, and the like use of ambiguous or inadequate expressions. Cranmer's views on the Sacrifice of the Eucharist must, of course, have been lowered by his intimacy with reformers who had imbibed the Zuinglian errors. Yet even in the book, which betrays much Zuinglian language and illustration, and contains passages scarcely reconcileable with any sound doctrine on the Sacraments, (his "Defence of the true and Catholic doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our SAVIOUr Christ, 1550") on the doctrine of the Sacrifice, he directs himself against statements either wholly Romish and erroneous, or which could most obviously be understood in a Romish sense, as though the priest sacrificed CHRIST, or the sacrifice benefited those who partook not of it, or as if there could be priest or sacrifice distinct from the priesthood or sacrifice of CHRIST, or (and that mainly) as if the sacrifice could be applied by the priest to whom he willed; on the other hand, there occur passages, which express so far at least the true doctrine, that the author could hardly have needed any further alteration of the Liturgy for his own sake. It is remarkable in this and many other instances, how the respect for the old Fathers, which was characteristic of our Anglican church, upheld those, who had otherwise, in all likelihood, lapsed in Ultra-Protestantism. On the principles of our Church, they could not but defer to the authority of the "old primitive and apostolic Church," and so were checked, even after they had half adopted views at variance with her's. An Ultra-Protestant would consistently reject the doctrine of the Sacrifice, (as he would the rite of Infant Baptism) because there is no explicit authority for it in Holy Scripture, no statement of it totidem verbis; the |