out or of dangers from
within Cranmer and his colleagues advanced more boldly than ever in the
career of innovation. Four prelates who adhered to the older system were
deprived of their sees and committed on frivolous pretexts to the Tower.
A new Catechism embodied the doctrines of the reformers, and a book of
Homilies which enforced the chief Protestant tenets was ordered to be
read in churches. A crowning defiance was given to the doctrine of the
Mass by an order to demolish the stone altars and replace them by wooden
tables, which were stationed for the most part in the middle of the
church. In 1552 a revised Prayer Book was issued, and every change made
in it leaned directly towards the extreme Protestantism which was at
this time finding a home at Geneva. On the cardinal point of difference,
the question of the sacrament, the new formularies broke away not only
from the doctrine of Rome but from that of Luther, and embodied the
anti-sacramentarian tenets of Zwingli and Calvin. Forty-two Articles of
Religion were introduced; and though since reduced by omissions to
thirty-nine these have remained to this day the formal standard of
doctrine in the English Church. Like the Prayer Book, they were mainly
the work of Cranmer; and belonging as they did to the class of
Confessions which were now being framed in Germany to be presented to
the Council of Christendom which Charles was still resolute to
reassemble, they marked the adhesion of England to the Protestant
movement on the Continent. Even the episcopal mode of government which
still connected the English Church with the old Catholic Communion was
reduced to a form; in Cranmer's mind the spiritual powers of the bishops
were drawn simply from the king's commission as their temporal
jurisdiction was exercised in the king's name. They were reduced
therefore to the position of royal officers, and called to hold their
offices simply at the royal pleasure. The sufferings of the Protestants
had failed to teach them the worth of religious liberty; and a new code
of ecclesiastical laws, which was ordered to be drawn up by a board of
Commissioners as a substitute for the Canon Law of the Catholic Church,
although it shrank from the penalty of death, attached that of perpetual
imprisonment or exile to the crimes of heresy, blasphemy, and adultery,
and declared excommunication to involve a severance of the offender from
the mercy of God and his deliverance into the tyranny of the