any man

of opinions; such men, I say, saw with sorrow and perplexity that increase of light had not brought with it increase of probity; that, as truth spread, charity and justice languished. In times past,' said Latimer, speaking from his own recollection, 'men were full of pity and compassion; but now there is no pity; for in London their brother shall die in the streets for cold; he shall lie sick at the door between stock and stock-I cannot tell what to call it-and then perish for hunger. In times past, when any rich man died in London, they were wont to help the scholars at the universities with exhibitions. When died they would bequeath great sums of money towards the relief of the poor. When I was a scholar at Cambridge myself, I knew many that had relief of the rich men in London; but now I can hear no such good report, and yet I enquire of it, and hearken for it. Charity is waxen cold; none helpeth the scholar, nor yet the poor; now that the knowledge of God's word is brought to light, and many earnestly study and labour to set it forth, now almost no man helpeth to maintain them.' While the country was in the darkness of superstition, landowners and merchants were generous, the people prosperous, the necesaries of life abundant and cheap. The light of the Gospel had come in, and with it selfishness, oppression, and misery. That was the appearance which England presented to the eyes of Latimer, and it was not for him to sit still and bear it." (p. 114.)

Within ten pages Mr. Froude gives a flatter contradiction to this prejudiced and flippant statement than it would be courteous for us to do in the present stage of our inquiry. The charge he brings against the reformation is that (in 1548) it had made England idle, poor, and profligate; against the reformers, that they were a set of ignorant fanatics-" unfortunate persons, who, for the sins of England, were its present teachers." Now, in the same chapter, and in the history of the same year, he tells us, on the authority of Sir William Paget writing to the Protector Somerset, that "the use of the new religion was not yet printed in the stomachs of eleven of twelve parts of the realm;" and he adds this comment of his own :-" When religion revived, the country righted of itself:" nor is he speaking of the revival of Popery under Mary, but of the state of England after the lapse of twenty years; that is, when the reformation was complete, and its principles had taken root under Elizabeth. If, then, one man in twelve only had embraced the reformation, the principles of the new religion could at least have produced no great amount of harm at present. The light of the Gospel had scarcely broken in; it was yet only struggling behind the darkness and the clouds, and the selfishness, oppression, and misery, which Latimer deplores, were due to some other cause. The reformers, then, the "unfortunate persons" aforesaid, were not the causes of the mischief, for their preaching not one man in ten believed. Nor were they the senseless enthusiasts they are represented; for it was under these very teachers, or in the light and warmth of the fires in which

they perished, that "religion revived, and then the country righted of itself."

It was the duty of an historian calmly to investigate the accuracy of Latimer's statement; and if it proved to be correct, then to trace out the causes of the state of things which he describes. A philosophical writer would have done so for the pleasure of the intellectual exercise-a veracious historian out of the mere love of truth. The materials would not have been difficult to find, and the conduct of Mr. Froude on a question of such importance is inexcusable. A little calm reflection would have shown him that the evils which Latimer deplores, and, as we shall show, unconsciously exaggerates, were the consequence of a state of transition which had no essential connexion with the doctrines of the reformation; and which might, indeed, have occurred, had the nation been passing from Protestantism into Popery instead of from Popery into the faith of the reformers. The King was a minor. England was over-run with factions. The Protector was not yet secure in his seat,-indeed he never sat firmly in it -and three years after, his rivals brought him to the scaffold. Throughout the country lawlessness prevailed, for regular government had only been established under the iron hand of a king who was always popular, because, however great a tyrant in his palace, he always provided for the upright administration of justice in his courts of law, and took an interest in the welfare of the meanest of his subjects. His strong arm was missed, and oppression and insecurity of life and limb returned. We may add that an unnatural war with Scotland had raged two years before, that an army had been disbanded, and in consequence the whole kingdom and the capital itself was traversed by a banditti who carried with them the ferocity of the worst kind of soldiers without those restraints which are wanted even for the best. This is mentioned in some state papers printed in Burnet's collection as one chief cause of England's misery. These evils were griev ously augmented, no doubt, by the suppression of the religious houses, and the rapacity of both the court and the nobility who shared the spoil. And this was the true meaning of old Latimer's complaint; and to his honest remonstrances whatever reparation was eventually made is chiefly due. When the monasteries were destroyed, the nobility, amongst whom the lands were divided, received them generally under the condition of keeping hospitality and giving relief to the poor. Once in possession, the conditions were soon forgotten. The irritation of the poor was great, and no doubt their sufferings were for a time considerable. But even thus the reformation was working well for England. The lazy crowds who swarmed at meal times at the buttery hatch of the next priory were a worthless rabble, mixed up, no doubt, with a few specimens of honest poverty. What the

bulk were, those of our readers who may have lived in a country parish where a dole was administered, of bread, or meat, or money, to all comers, without selection and without enquiry, will picture for themselves. The breaking up of this rude system of parochial relief, though not intended, was, in fact, one of the national blessings of the reformation. But at first the process was severe; for the really deserving poor were left to starve, and the idle vagabond had not yet learned to work. It was not till Elizabeth had occupied the throne some years that a remedy was found; not in whipping or hanging vagabonds, which she tried at first, but in the establishment of a national poor rate, the parent of our present code of poor laws. More serious, at least in their consequences, were the delinquencies of the court. Henry had designed to make some restitution to the plundered church of England by the endowments he contemplated; yet, in 1550, no colleges, schools, or hospitals were yet endowed, and ignorance of course increased. There was, Burnet tells us," a very scandalous venality of all offices and employments; insomuch that it was our scandal at the court of France, and the ambassador there wrote over an account of it." Ridley wrote to Sir John Cheke, requesting a prebend in St. Paul's for Grindal. He was told the prebend was kept for the furniture of the king's stable! Thus, in fact, the reformation was scarcely begun; and to complain that in 1548 its results were evil, is as absurd in the mouth of an historian as it would be if, in this first week of a cold July, without sun or genial warmth, Mr. Froude were to quarrel with his gardener, and cut down his pear tree, because the pears are yet green and hard and rather bitter. He might with more reason have quarrelled with the reformation for not advancing fast anough, and with the reformers for being far too lenient to the old Romish clergy. The archbishop of York, for instance, "was living with another man's wife, more set on enriching himself than anything else; a reproach to the reformation rather than a promoter of it";-one of the bishops who well deserved the character which king Henry gave to all of them. "Some for sloth, some for ignorance, some for luxury, some for popery, are unfit for discipline and government." (Burnet's Reformation, part iii. book iv.) Yet such men were permitted to remain, upon a faint shew of conformity.

Mr. Froude, in the passage before us, speaks with undisguised contempt of the evangelical preachers, "the unfortunate persons," who said, according to his version of their teaching, "you cannot keep the commandments-that has been done for you believe a certain speculative theory, and avoid the errors of popery.' And he intimates that, to sensible men, "like Cranmer, Latimer, Becon, Bradford or Lever, God and duty were of more importance than schemes of salvation." In a note more pert and even more incorrect than the text itself, he informs us that for this, "they were despised or lamented over by the advanced liberals;" and,

in support, he quotes from the Zurich Letters, Epistola Tigurine, p. 211. He does not inform us from what edition he quotes, and we have not been able to find the extract either in Burnet or in the more complete edition of the Parker Society,—a work of the utmost value to every student of the reformation, and accessible to every reader through the admirable translation of Dr. Hastings Robinson. But even his own extract does not justify his comments. It says, that "as to Canterbury, he so conducts himself that our people have no great confidence in him." So writes Traheron to Bullinger; but with regard to Latimer his tone is laudatory. "Latimer, though he does not see very clearly (tametsi non liquide perspiciat), is superior to Luther, or even Bucer. He sees further than the rest; since he possesses a mind evidently spiritual (est ingenio plane divino). But he moves slowly, and renounces with difficulty an opinion once imbibed." It is hardly necessary to add, that posterity has confirmed the judgment of this German writer; but we discover nothing here to sustain, in the slightest degree, the accusation that the great reformers were despised by "the advanced liberals" because they held moral lessons of duty to be more important than doctrinal statements.

The impression which Mr. Froude leaves on the mind of his reader is, that while the leaders of the reformation were anxious to impress morality upon the people, they looked down with disfavour, if not dislike, upon the men who taught the peculiar doctrines of revelation, or, as he prefers to speak, "a certain speculative theory." This is not only untrue, but it is an untruth direct and palpable. We have not now to make acquaintance with the Zurich Letters, and we charge Mr. Froude with wilfully misrepresenting them; or, if he prefers the alternative, with quoting from documents into which he has merely dipped, and with which he has a very slight acquaintance. The great names he has mentioned were yet only in the twilight of their new religion. Cranmer was the least enlightened; Latimer, wisely cautious, had a lion's heart, and when he felt his ground sure beneath him, a giant's tread. None of them complained, as Mr. Froude intimates, that the meanest of their colleagues preached too much of the gospel, or insisted too vehemently on the fact that the sinner cannot keep the commandments; much less did they regret to hear, for they themselves were loud in proclaiming it, that "it had been done for them" by Him who is "our righteousness." ." Antinomianism had scarcely appeared; it was confined to the Anabaptists, who had made their way over from Germany; it had not infected the church of England. When it broke out, soon afterwards, like a pestilence, it was confronted by these sainted men, not by calling off attention from the doctrines of the gospel, but by the opposite process; the more they were caricatured the more did they insist upon these doctrines being fully taught, and wisely expounded. The more they were maligned the

more they asserted their supremacy. We find, all through their history, down to the last moment of their lives, no temporizing upon this point. They were gospel ministers, and in this they gloried; for they knew that the errors, the immorality, and the seditions which vexed England, were owing, not to the excess of gospel light or gospel liberty, but to the want of both.

There is no more certain mark of a mean capacity than unseasonable jesting. Our ancestors have left us this wise reflection, and, that it might never be forgotten, they have stamped it on our mother tongue. They have taught us that "a jester" and "a fool" were one; two names for the same half idiot, half buffoon, who made official sport for these Philistines of old. A jester who reserves his mirth for great topics on which wise men have been perplexed and good men divided, may have more sense than the official fool, but he has a worse heart. Mr. Froude has had to treat in this volume of the bursting into flower of a plant which has since filled England with its fragrance, and he kicks it aside with his foot like a noxious weed. He has had to describe the grandest struggle through which the moral life of England has ever passed, and he treats it as if it had been the bye-play of knaves and imbeciles. He has had to shew us through what means, amidst what disasters, and with what mistakes, the mightiest tyranny under which a nation ever groaned was resisted, cast off, and utterly destroyed. History does not offer a nobler theme, modern history not one to be compared with it; and he proves his incapacity, as such minds do. He prates of it with the pertness of an untamed school-boy.

In 1549, before the reformation, even as then contemplated, was complete, insurrection broke out first in the west of England, then in Oxfordshire, Norfolk, and other counties. It was excited by the priests, and blazed out on Whitsunday, the day on which the English liturgy was read for the first time in the parish churches. Some great questions were still in doubt; the real presence in the Supper was one of them. We admire the moderation which invited foreign divines to discuss the doctrine with the wisest of our own, at our universities. Mr. Froude can see nothing to respect either, it would seem, in the subject itself, or in the method in which the wisest men of that generation sought to have their doubts removed. He says, "the two universities were made an arena for a disputation on the real presence, where foreign protestants were to confound superstition.' "The Oxford and Cambridge schools rang with their unprofitable jargon, and the victory of course was ruled to be with the innovators." "Commissions, arguments which ought to convince, and a prison for those who remained unsatisfied; these, without further trouble, were to establish religion, aud restore the suffering people to prosperity." ""Peter Martyr and the Oxford controversy had set on fire Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire." (p. 167, &c.) That the in