to be sent, to confront the terrible Weston at the head of another set of Commissioners. Hereupon Hooper addressed to his brethren a letter both demanding and giving counsel. "You know," said he, "how our adversaries report of those great, godly, and learned men of Oxford: that they overcame them. So will they report of us: our adversaries will be our censors and judges: they thirst for our blood: and whether we overcame them or were overcome by them, it would be the same. I suppose then it would be best to appeal to be heard before the Queen and Council: of whom many know the truth, some are more zealous than malicious, others that are indurate should be answered fully, to their shame. Let us appeal to be heard either before the Queen and Council or else before all the Parliament, as was used in King Edward's time. For my part I will require further both books and paper to answer. Help, I pray you, that brother Saunders and the rest in the Marshalsea may understand these things: and send me your answer quickly."* On this a consultation appears to have been held among the prisoners in the various prisons and their resolution was, to refuse to dispute otherwise than by writing, unless it should be before the Queen and Council, or before Parliament: to give the reasons of their refusal; and to publish therewith a confession of their faith, to confute the damaging imputation of heresy, that was so freely laid against them. "We will not dispute," proceeded the prisoners in this timely and important manifest, "otherwise than is aforesaid, because the determinations of the Universities, on which we should dispute, are directly against God's word, and against their own former determinations in the late reign because neither is verity sought, nor charity

Fox. It is this letter that contains the passage quoted before, about there being no law to condemn them. Above, p. 176.

observed, nor safety allowed: because the censors and judges are such as they shewed themselves of late both at Oxford and in the Convocation House last October: because we should be stopped in our arguments, hissed, and scoffed at; because the notaries would not or dare not favour the truth, and moreover are not allowed to have in custody what they write after the disputation, but the censors and judges add or diminish at their pleasure. But here we write and send forth in a sum our faith, and every part thereof, that our brethren may know it. The faith that we hold here follows. We believe and confess all the canonical books of the Old Testament, and all the books of the New Testament to be the very word of God, and the judge of all controversies of religion. We believe and confess that the Catholic Church embraces and follows the doctrines of those books in all matters of religion, and is to be heard accordingly. We believe and confess all the articles of the Apostles' Creed, of the symbols of the Councils of Nice, of Constantinople the Second, of Ephesus, of Chalcedon, of Toletum the First and the Fourth, and the symbols of Athanasius, Irenæus, Tertullian, and Pope Damasus: we believe them generally and particularly." On Justification they expressed themselves at some length and with moderation, observing and explaining the distinction between inherent and imputed righteousness, and explicitly disallowing "the papistical doctrines of Free Will, Works of supererogation, of merit, of the necessity of auricular confession, and of making satisfaction" in discipline and penance. * They

* "We believe and confess concerning Justification, that, as it cometh only from God's mercy through Christ, so it is perceived and had of none which be of years of discretion otherwise than by Faith only: which Faith is not an opinion, but a certain persuasion wrought by the Holy Ghost in the mind and heart of man, wherethrough as the Mind is illuminated, so the heart is suppled to submit itself to the will of God

rejected the service in the Latin tongue, the invocation of saints, purgatory, inasses of scala coeli, trentals, "and

unfeignedly, and so sheweth forth an inherent righteousness, which is to be discerned, in the article of justification, from the righteousness which God endueth us withal, justifying us, although inseparably they go together. And this we do not for curiosity or contention's sake, but for conscience' sake, that it might be quiet, which it can never be, if we confound without distinction forgiveness of sins, and Christ's justice imputed to us, with regeneration and inherent righteousness. By this we disallow papistical doctrine of free will, of works of supererogation, of merits, of the necessity of auricular confession, and satisfaction to Godwards." Observe here,-1. That justification is said to come only from God's mercy through Christ. 2. It is perceived and had by faith only. 3. Which faith is not merely opinion. 4. But such as leads man to show forth an inherent righteousness. 5. Which righteousness is different though inseparable from the righteousness received in justification. 6. And thus forgiveness of sins and Christ's righteousness imputed is to be distinguished from regeneration and inherent righteousness. With these positions may be compared the following from the Tridentine decrees (Sess. vi. anno 1547). I. Sins are not forgiven, nor ever was forgiven, unless freely, by the mercy of God, for Christ's sake." (Cap. 9.)——2. “We are said to be justified by faith only because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification." (Cap. 8.)——3. “But this faith is distinct from the vain confidence (fiducia) and assurance of heretics and schismatics.” (Cap. 9.)———4. “The sole formal cause of justification is the righteousness of God, not that by which He himself is righteous, but that by which He makes us righteous." (Cap. 7.)——5. "With which (formal righteousness) being indued by Him, we are renewed in the spirit of our mind, and are not only accounted righteous, but are properly called righteous (non modo reputamur, sed vere justi nominamur)." (Cap. 7.)

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-6. “Si quis dixerit homines justificari vel sola imputatione justitiæ Christi, vel sola peccatorum remissione exclusa gratia et caritate, quæ in cordibus eorum per Spiritum Sanctum diffundatur atque in illis inhæreat : aut etiam gratiam qua justificamur esse tantum favorem Dei, anathema sit." (Canon 11.) From this comparison it may seem that these Confessors conceded all that they could on Justification. The point of difference lay in the fourth particular, the formal cause of justification, whether it were inherent righteousness: or inherent righteousness was shown forth thereupon. The whole controversy may be brought to this," said Bellarmine. ("Status totius controversiæ ad hanc simplicem questionem revocari potest, sit ne formalis causa absolutæ justificationis justitia in nobis inhærens, an ron." De Justif. ii. 2.) The point is well exhibited by Parsons in his Examen of Fox and the Calvinists, whom Fox favoured. "In the first point then, about the inward principles of our outward actions, truth it is that they agree with us in somewhat to wit, that all good cometh originally from God's holy grace and motion: but presently

such suffrages as the Popish Church doth obtrude as necessary." They denied transubstantiation, and the adoration, reservation, and carrying about of the Sacrament: the Mass to be a propitiatory sacrifice for the quick and dead, the mutilation of the Eucharist by subtracting one kind from the lay people: the inhibition of marriage to any state. This instrument, of May 8, was signed by Ferrar, Taylor, Bradford, and Philpot in the prison of King's Bench, by Lawrence Saunders and Edmund Lawrence in the Marshalsea, by Crome and Hooper in the Fleet, by Rogers in Newgate, by Coverdale who was under mild restraint somewhere, and by the initial letters of two others. Never in history has one paper borne the names of so many martyrs, written by their own hands.*

Men such as these, and their fellows at Oxford, were the real reformers of the Church of England. They had, most of them, the Puritan inclination: some had they disagree again, for that they hold our grace of justification to be no inherent quality, but only an external imputation; and that God's motion to our minds is such as it excludeth wholly all concourse and cooperation of our free will: whereby they cut off at one blow all endeavours of our part to do any goodness at all, and leave us as a stone or block to be moved by God only." Three Conversions, iii. 458. Hence these Confessors are found to include Free Will among "papistical doctrines." Nothing could be more moderate than the language of Trent on that. "When God touches the heart of man by the illumination of the Holy Ghost, man is not altogether passive (neque ipse homo nihil omnino agit), since he receives that influence which he has power to reject: on the other hand man could not of his free will take any step towards righteousness before God (movere se ad justitiam coram illo) without the grace of God." (Cap. 5.)

* Fox, iii. 82. The initials are J. P. and T. M. The latter may possibly be those of Thomas Matthew, the mysterious editor of the Bible called by his name as to whom see Vol. I. p. 519 of this work. If it could be assumed that these initials were his, it might be an additional argument against his supposed identity with Rogers: unless Rogers signed twice, once in his own name, and then with the first letters of his supposed pseudonym. The name of Coverdale is added in a way to mark his different condition from the rest. "To these things aforesaid do I, Miles Coverdale, late of Exon, consent and agree with these mine afflicted brethren, being prisoners, mine own hand." Fox, iii. 83.

been in the late reign Nonconformist upon several points in the English service: but when the question came to be between the English service and the Latin, their nonconformity sank into the second place, and they appeared as one band. All now turned indeed upon this point, that the liturgic reformation, the Scriptures in English included, was not to be given up. It was the most valuable part of the Reformation. The Mass had been altered into a communion; that is, it had ceased to be private, in one kind to the lay people, in Latin: Transubstantiation had been denied, and that the Mass was a propitiatory sacrifice for the quick and dead but yet the Presence therein was maintained, and the nature of a Sacrament reaffirmed in the exclusion of other doctrines. All this was now being cast away: the meliæval service was merely restored as it had been before, as if there had been no research, no opening of the fountains the interrogation of antiquity was forbidden to bear fruit: the anathematisms of a new council, for the authority of Trent seemed now to menace the realm, swept into the mesh of heresy opinions left indifferent before, or rather did away the distinction of things necessary and indifferent. The best results of a quarter of a century of change and struggle were to be flung to the winds at the will of a set of Churchmen who denounced their fellow Churchmen by the most opprobrious of ecclesiastical designations. To prevent this it was required that some should die.

The appellation of heresy was indignantly regarded by these men: or amazed them, in adversaries not devoid of learning, like the outcry of fanatic ignorance. To be called heretics by that part of the Church who were for restoring all that had been before the twentieth year of Henry the Eighth (which was the design that was coming more and more into view), or by those (if the