1841. Published by T.CLERC SMITTI, 13 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden.

It is one of the painful conditions of humanity that we can only know the past by the representations of men who have generally had some misleading influence or other at work upon their own minds; hence it is no easy matter to profit by the experience of other ages. The history of the Reformation strongly illustrates this position. The reports of party writers (and all are party writers) convey little but the honours of their own, and the infamy of their opponents', cause. Each class has propagated itself by regular descent to the present day, and many a disciple of Foxe and Harpsfield could even now call down fire from heaven on the detestable papists, or wicked heretics, abont him.

There is indeed some appearance of a better feeling (if it is not leading to any confusion of right and wrong, a more insidious, though not less fatal, danger than asperity,) in modern authors. Collier, the fairest of old' historians, is being reprinted; Blunt's exquisite sketch of the period has been extensively read; Lingard, although uniformly unfair by suppression, is seldom false or violent; Turner is strongly impressed with the general mediocrity of human virtue ; and Soames can feel for even a Romish martyr.

Love of truth, for its own sake, should make every good man rejoice in this improvement; but there are higher considerations which increase its value. In the fervour of our admiration for individuals, their holiness, constancy, and wisdom, and in detestation of the cruelty and blindness of their antagonists, we transfer to ourselves, mere followers in their track, that kind of merit which can only belong to the masterly originators of a resistance to deeply-rooted error. We shut our eyes to their faults, because, having identified ourselves with them, we should feel their faults, if acknowledged as our own. And thus we lose sight of God's inscrutable providence, which so overruled the commotions of the age, as to preserve his church, and emancipate his people, in these realms, from a spiritual tyranny, just before the council of Trent canonized its worst abuses. Like sea-warriors fighting

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in a storm, the reformers beat off their enemies gallantly ; but both sides used unlawful weapons and foul language; and if ours brought their ship safe into harbour, it was with sails rent and a shattered hull.

In this view it may not be unprofitable to watch to its dark conclusion the conflict of three powerful disputants who conducted the leading controversy of the Reformation, Gardiner, Hooper, and Cranmer. These were men who may fairly be considered as each the leader of a party. All deserve that respect which is generally paid to those who are ready to suffer rather than abandon a conviction ; yet all, to some extent, failed in the exercise of that very virtue. Few will believe that Gardiner ever honestly entertained and forsook the sentiments expressed in his book, “ De vera obedientia ;"* or that Hooper was more convinced of the lawfulness of episcopal robes when he assumed, than when he subjected himself to imprisonment for refusing, them;t or that Cranmer believed the fifth of that series of confessions which appears to have been extorted from him to abate the honours of his martyrdom.

The first appearance of an encounter between any of these three polemics gave promise of a Christian and honourable warfare. The act of six articles was in full operation when Sir Thomas Arundel sent his steward, John Hooper, to benefit by conference with the bishop of Winchester on the subject of transubstantiation. Hooper at the time was in all probability as much a sacramentary as at any subsequent period of his life ; yet the bishop detained him for four or five days, in which he repeatedly debated the matter ; and finding his convictions unshaken, dismissed him with an eulogy upon his learning.

Hooper, however, soon found his abode unsafe in England, and Hed to Zurich; while Gardiner provided for the defence of his views on the topic of their dispute. In September, 1546, he published “A detection of the Devil's Sophistrie, wherewith he robbeth the unlearned people of the true by leef in the most blessed sacrament of the aulter." With such a cause as his, one cannot be surprised at his striking occasionally into a strain that reminds one of the abbot of Cross Raguel's “Shortest and onely Way;" telling the world, for instance, concerning transubstantiation, “ that the church of God testifyeth and thynketh this to be the true beleef of the most blessed sacrament of the aulter ; that there is present the natural body and blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ. Good men in the same church with their bodily senses have seen and heard as much matter repugnant to their senses in the mysticall and devout use of the blessed sacrament as the devil now telleth in scoffing tales, and yet therwith reteyned styll the same fayth inviolably; wherefore all good men should likewise do the same nowe without curiositie or serche how the same myght be which to good men shulde be a solucyon for the hoole matter."

But there were better arguments than these in the work, and some of them well put; as, the importance of seeking truth in a legitimate way, the invalidity of mere mystery as an argument against revelation, and the fact of some mystery being inherent in Christ's body. He states as one sophistry of the devil the doctrine of a real presence without transubstantiation-a belief, as he calls it, in an impanate God. Against the sacramentary statements of Joy, Bale, and Turner, he adduces collections from St. Andrew (as he says), Chrysostom, Ignatius, Irenæus, Tertullian, Augustine, Cyprian, Cyril, Hilary, and Jerome, and winds up with a well-written invective against the profane manner in which so solemn a subject was then commonly treated.* The resort to church as a place of preaching, not a house of prayer, which began already to prevail as its natural consequence, and the neglect of all church discipline by those who "wyll pass none of their own private suppers, even on the greatest fastynge day, without flesshe for deynties.f Yet in the supper of the Lord, as they call it, they devise a diete without delycacies to have nothing present but bread and wine."

Vo sooner had this book arrived at Zurich, which was not until after a lapse of seven months from the date of its publication, than Hooper, then residing there, undertook to answer it; and in four months and nine days from that time appeared, in quarto, “ An Answer unto my Lord of Winchester's Booke, intytlyd, A Detection, &c., made by Johann Hoper, MDXLVII.”

The preface of this rare book contains some remarkable passages on free will, in an estimate of the mischief Gardiner's work was likely to do. The author then proceeds to argue solidly from Scripture and common sense against transubstantiation, but often runs out into long digressions on the enormities of Romish superstition, by which he conceives the mass has been stripped entirely of its sacramental character, and changed into Antichristian idolatry. He goes so far as to assert the unlawfulness of church governors enforcing any rule save that of the Bible, and inflicts a pretty severe castigation on such men as Cranmer, who, like Melancthon, inclined to give up anything for the double blessing of improvement and peace. The most important part of the book, however, is that in which he states his own views of the sacraments. They attest in a lively manner what has been already done, rather than do anything themselves :-“ Though he sayd the wyne was his blud, and the breade his body, he ment none otherwyce but that it representid his body." Yet it becomes evident as he proceeds that Hooper regarded the Lord's Supper as no common nor inefficient sign: it was a means and pledge of heavenly grace; so that while his lips received the emblem, his soul was drawn up by its sacramental power to communion with God :-“ The thing present

Yet in the title-page of the book are seen two monkeys riding on goats and tilting with a pitchfork and a broom.

| Hooper accommodated bimself so as to catch the full force of this rebuke. Strype E, Mem. IL ii. 265.

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