were originally forty-two, drawn up under the supervision of Cranmer as the bonds of Christian union, the conditions of Christian fellowship. It is asserted, in this confession of faith,

1. That there is an infinite Spirit, and in the unity of this Godhead there be three persons of one substance, power, and eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.'

2. That the fall of Adam 'brought death into the world and all our woe.'

3. That, by Adam's transgression, we are shapen in iniquity, and conceived in sin.

4. That Christ, of the same substance with the Father, died for our original guilt and our actual sins.

5. That none can emerge from this state of pollution, and be saved, but by Christ.

6. That every person born into the world deserveth God's wrath and damnation.'

7. That predestination to life is the everlasting purpose of God. . . to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind.'

The English Reformers can scarcely be said to have arrived at any definite conclusions. Luther and Calvin framed the speculative doctrines for Protestant Europe. Both declared the utter depravity of human nature, and 'eternal fire' the punishment of the lost. Calvin was an uncompromising predestinarian, who taught that the Fall with all its consequences was predetermined ages before the Creation; that the fate of each individual was thus irrevocably decided before he was called into existence; that out of the ruined race a few are selected for eternal bliss; that the rest are pre-ordained to 'most grievous torments in soul and body without intermission in hell-fire for ever.' Luther was only less explicit, hardly aware, perhaps, of the extreme to which his acrimonious zeal logically carried him. The mild and sagacious Erasmus had written a defence of free-will, to which Luther replies:

The human will is like a beast of burden. If God mounts it, it wishes and goes as God wills; if Satan mounts it, it wishes and goes as Satan wills. Nor can it choose the rider it would prefer, or betake itself to him, but it is the riders who contend for its possession.

Again:

This is the acme of faith, to believe that He is merciful who saves so few and who condemns so many: that He is just who at His own pleasure has made us necessarily doomed to damnation.'

Thus the two great founders of Protestantism designed, it would appear, to construct a religious system which should be as distinct and exclusive as that which they assailed, but which should represent more faithfully the teachings of the first four centuries. The Puritans, simple and rigorous, preferred the grim and pitiless features of the Calvinistic system, whose spirit, however, has long been yielding to conciliation and charity. The Anglicans, practical, prudent, and more worldly, favored rather the less gloomy and more conservative system of Luther. Both found common ground in the idea of the inexorable Judge, the alarm of conscience, the impotence and inherited poison of nature, the necessity of grace, the rejection of rites and ceremonies. A period of passion and conflict throws men naturally upon dogmatic systems, nor is the mind easily extricated from old theological modes of thought. A century was required to develop fully the germ of rationalism that had been cast abroad. Still, the intellect was moving onward, the tenor of life was changing, and at the close of the century the disposition was perceptible to interpret the articles of special creeds, not by the precept and example of tradition, but by the light of reason and of conscience. A remarkable evidence of the transition is found in Jewel's Apology, and, a generation later, in Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity,-the two most important theological works which appeared in England during the reign of Elizabeth. Both wrote with the avowed object of defending the Established Church, but their methods are entirely different. The first inculcates the importance of faith, collects the decisions of antiquity, and regards the men assertions of the Fathers, when uncontradicted by Scripture, as proofs positive. The second insists upon the exercise of reason, and lays little stress upon the ancients, evidently considering that his readers would be slightly impressed by their unsupported opinions. He says:

For men to be tied and led by authority, as it were with a kind of captivity of judgment, and, though there be reason to the contrary, not to listen unto it, but to follow, like beasts, the first in the herd, they know not nor care not whither: this were brutish. Again, that authority of men should prevail with men, either against or above Reason, is no part of our belief. Companies of learned men, be they never so great and reverend, are to yield unto Reason.'

Written in 1561 or 1562. This, the Bible, and Fox's Martyrs were ordered to be fixed in all parish churches, to be read by the people.'

When this could be said, the English intellect had made immense progress.

With the revolution in Church, preaching changed its object and character. It became more earnest, popular, and moral. The Age of Doctrines was to follow. In the pulpit, it was not yet sought to exhibit dialectics, but to recall men-sailors, soldiers, workmen, servants-to their duties. At least, this is what we see in the sermons of Latimer (1472–1555), a genuine Englishman, serious, courageous, and solid, sprung from the heart and sinews of the nation. He never speaks for the sake of speaking. With him, practice is before all; theology-the metaphysics of religion-secondary. To reprove the rich, who oppress the poor by enclosures, he details the needs of the peasant:

A plough land must have sheep; yea, they must have sheep to dung their ground for bearing of corn; for if they have no sheep to help to fat the ground, they shall have but bare corn and thin. They must have swine for their food, to make their veneries or bacon of their bacon is their venison, for they shall now have hangum tuum if they get any other venison; so that bacon is their necessary meat to feed on, which they may not lack. They must have other cattle: as horses to draw their plongh, and for carriage of things to the markets; and kine for their milk and cheese, which they must live upon and pay their rents. These cattle must have pasture, which pasture if they lack, the rest must needs fail them: and pasture they cannot have, if the land be taken in, and enclosed from them.'

Only the wish to convince, to denounce vice, and to do justice. No grand words, no show of style, no exaltation. Generally, it may be observed, the preachers of the earlier part of the sixteenth century were accustomed to take a wide range, to bring together into a miscellaneous assortment topics from every region of heaven and earth. Not more fastidious as to manner. Their style, like that of most contemporary prose, is simpler in construction, more familiar and homely, than that which came into fashion in the later years of the Elizabethan period. Their kind of writing, however, though indirectly interesting, and historically valuable, can hardly be regarded as partaking the character of literary composition.

But that which penetrated the imagination and language of England more than any word, lay or ecclesiastic, was the Bible itself, wherein the simple folk, without other books and open to new emotions, pricked by the reproaches of conscience and the presentiment of the dark future, looked suddenly with awe and trembling upon the face of the eternal King, read or heard the

tables of his law, the archives of his vengeance, and with the whole attention of eyes and heart filled themselves with his promises and threats. Condemned, hunted, in concealment, Tyndale translated from the Greek, in the reign of Henry VIII, the New Testament and a portion of the Old. It was this Book which, revised by Coverdale, and edited in 1539, as Cromwell's Bible, again in 1540, as Cranmer's Bible, was set up in every English parish church by the very sovereign who had caused the translator to be strangled and burned. It was not only a discovery of salvation to the troubled conscience, but the revelation of a new literature the only literature practically accessible to all, and comprising at once legends and annals, war-song and psalm, philosophy and vision. Imagine the effect upon minds essentially unoccupied by any history, romance, or poetry, and anxiously alive to the grandeurs and terrors which pass before their they gather in crowds Sunday after Sunday, day after day, to hear its marvellous accent:

eyes as

Many well-disposed people used much to resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that had an audible voice to read to them. . . . One John Porter used sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a big stature; and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him, because he could read well and had an audible voice."

The Koran alone can boast an equal share of reverence, spread far and wide; and as a mere literary monument, the English Bible is the noblest example of the English tongue. Of its 6,000 words, only 250 are not in common use, and nearly all of these last are readily understood.

Ethics.-Occam, the Nominalist, had taught that moral distinctions originate in the arbitrary appointment of God; that 'no act is evil but as prohibited by Him, or which cannot be made good by His command.'

Catholics, who appealed to tradition, Protestants, who appealed only to Scripture,-confirmed the pernicious error. On none of these principles could there be a science of morality. That was possible only when men, seeking for just ideas of right and wrong, should begin to interrogate their moral sense more than the books of theologians, and make this faculty the supreme arbiter, moulding theology into conformity with its dictates. The moral was still subordinate to the dogmatic side of religion. It

needed the profound sagacity of Hooker to give anything like currency to the following principle, in which the rationalistic tendency to a philosophy of morals is first decidedly manifest:

Those precepts which learned men have committed to writing, transcribing them from the common reason and common feelings of human nature, are to be accounted not less divine than those contained in the tables given to Moses; nor was it God's intention to supersede by a law graven on stone that which is written with His own finger on the table of the heart."

Two years later, in 1596, appeared Lord Bacon's Essays, which, if they offered nothing new to the English heart, revealed much to the English consciousness, and formed an emphatic agency in the history of English practical ethics.

In general, estimated by the standard of the present, moral perceptions were clouded, and moral sympathies were neither expansive nor acute. Add to this the reflexive influence of religious belief in particular, the doctrine of exclusive salvation, and we have an adequate explanation of the burnings, tortures, imprisonments, animosities and wars which for so many centuries marked the conflicts of theological bodies. As long as it was believed that those who rejected certain opinions were excluded from eternal felicity, so long would scepticism be branded a sin, and credulity a virtue. As long as the Church, by a favorite image of the Fathers, was regarded as a solitary Ark floating on a boundless sea of ruin, the heretic, as an offender against the Almighty, was to be reclaimed or punished, and heresy was to be corrected or stifled — by persuasion if possible, by violence if necessary. While some of the persecutions, even some of the most atrocious, sprang from purely selfish motives, I doubt not that they were mainly due to the sincere conviction that the cause of truth (as apprehended) required the sacrifice of its foes. Men had yet to learn that mere acts of the understanding are neither right nor wrong; and that unbelief, whether good or bad, must receive its character from the dispositions or motives which produce or pervade it.

Science. In Wonder,' says Coleridge, all Philosophy began; in Wonder it ends: and Admiration fills up the interspace.' Better, it is suggested,—and Investigation fills up the interspace. In the first wonder and the last, the poet and the philosopher are akin; but the emotion tends to different results. The former wonders at the beauty in the face of Nature, but seeks