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CHAPTER VII.

"Our religion has neither novelty nor singularity in it. It is an old religion—it is of age, and can speak for itself. It has been handed down to us through many sufferings and persecutions, and here it is preserved. It contracted, indeed, in the coming down, a great deal of rust, by the falseness and carelessness of its keepers, particularly by the Church of Rome. We scowered off the rust, and kept the metal; that is the Romish religion, this is the English. They added false doctrines to the Christian faith; we left the one, and kept to the other: this is ancient, those are new."-Dr Hascard's Discourse about the Charge of Novelty.

IN all the transactions of that great crisis we have just been considering-through all the turns and phases of the Church's history in which we have accompanied her during the last reign, so extremely questionable was the sincerity of Henry, that his death was rather hailed as a blessing than felt as an evil to the Church. The

friends and conductors of the Reformation, as they had placed no confidence in him, so could they feel no gratitude towards him for any one of those half measures of reform he introduced, by the very tardiness of which he satisfied neither party, whilst he disgusted both. Had the Reformation depended upon his support alone, we should in all probability at this moment have been groping our way in the gross darkness of popish error, or the light of Gospel truth might only now be bursting on our benighted land. Protestanism, therefore, owes but little thanks to Henry, who, in heart a papist, and in conduct a despot worthy of the Church in which he had been nurtured, rather delayed than accelerated that mighty movement which, from the days of Wicliffe, had, by virtue of its own principles, and not by any external assistance, been working its way slowly but steadily among the great mass of the people.

The King, as well as the Pope, appears to have been swayed throughout the struggle that was so long maintained between them, by political rather than religious motives; and if the latter lost his supremacy over England by an obstinate adherence to state considerations, the former certainly can claim from Protestants no higher praise for legalizing their resistance of papal aggression, than that which was due to a 'fearless appeal to the rising spirit of the times

a spirit that accorded so exactly with the mind and temper of a capricious tyrant, that he could not avoid taking advantage of it, for it admirably seconded the fierce determination of the monarch to reign over the whole Church and State as the supreme head of both, and independent of any foreign jurisdiction whatsoever. Had Henry imbibed the scriptural doctrines of our pure religion, he would have eminently deserved the title of "Defender of the Faith," for he must have carried the Reformation far beyond the point at which it was taken up by his successor; but caring little for the purity of a religion whose doctrines convicted him of sin, he was content, not from any love for Protestantism, but hatred of the Pope, to strike down the papal arm that threatened him, and to rid himself of a subjection that he felt to be both degrading and inconvenient. Thanks be to God, therefore, for thus mercifully overruling the angry passions of a cruel and godless prince, to the good of his Church, and the glory of his name! and for raising up, at this critical juncture, a second Josiah for his Church and people in the person of the youthful Edward!

Born and educated with the utmost care in the Protestant faith, and called to the throne of these realms at the early age of nine years, this young and interesting child gave early proof of "the excellent spirit" he was of. Observing

the swords that were to be carried before him at his coronation, he remarked to his attendants that one was wanting, and immediately called for a Bible. "That," he exclaimed, "is the sword of the Spirit; without that sword we are nothing we can do nothing; by that we are what we are this day; under that we ought to live, to fight, to govern the people, and to perform all our affairs-from that alone we obtain all power, virtue, grace, salvation, and whatsoever we have of divine strength."*

During Edward's minority the government of the country was vested in certain commissioners, who took on themselves a difficult duty when they assumed the direction of the public affairs, which, as relating both to the civil and ecclesiastical administration of them, were of the most complicated and discordant character. The Church, at Henry's death, was, as has already been shown, in the utmost disorder; all her members were out of joint, and truly might it be said "there was no whole part in her." It required, therefore, the most consummate skill and judgment to reduce so deranged a mass to order, uniformity, and agreement.

The Reformation, as far as it had yet proceeded, had removed but little of that gross weight of error and superstition which still

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Southey's Book of the Church, vol. ii. p. 182.

pressed heavily on her doctrine and discipline. An overwhelming load of corruption, the accumulation of 600 years, was yet to be cleared away, and much labour and care were necessary in proceeding with the work of arrangement and restoration. The workmen were worthy of the work, and equal to the labour; they "proceeded with exemplary prudence, precipitating nothing, but gradually unfolding their well-digested plans in such a manner as to afford them a reasonable hope of satisfying their own consciences, and the just expectation of posterity."*

The eyes of all Europe were at this time fixed on the proceedings of the Council of Trent, which had now been sitting for two years, with the avowed intention of reforming the Church. Great expectations were raised among the Roman Catholics, that the measures adopted by the Tridentine fathers would bring back the Protestants to the bosom of the Church; but the feelings and designs of the Roman pontiff were quite in opposition to this expectation. He was resolved to make no concessions, to suffer no innovation, to consent to no change the Protestants were doomed to be duped-and the advocates for reform in the Church of Rome to be disappointed.

* Soames's Hist. of the Reformation, vol. iii. p. 51.

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