e
English authority at bay across St. George's Channel.

With England and Ireland alike at his feet, Cromwell could venture on a
last and crowning change. He could claim for the monarchy the right of
dictating at its pleasure the form of faith and doctrine to be taught
throughout the land. Henry had remained true to the standpoint of the
New Learning; and the sympathies of Cromwell were mainly with those of
his master. They had no wish for any violent break with the
ecclesiastical forms of the past. They desired religious reform rather
than religious revolution, a simplification of doctrine rather than any
radical change in it, the purification of worship rather than the
introduction of any wholly new ritual. Their theology remained, as they
believed, a Catholic theology, but a theology cleared of the
superstitious growths which obscured the true Catholicism of the early
Church.

In a word, their dream was the dream of Erasmus and Colet. The spirit of
Erasmus was seen in the articles of religion which were laid before
convocation in 1536; in the acknowledgment of justification by faith, a
doctrine for which the founders of the New Learning, such as Contarini
and Pole, were struggling at Rome itself; in the condemnation of
purgatory, of pardons, and of masses for the dead, as it was seen in the
admission of prayers for the dead and in the retention of the ceremonies
of the Church without material change.

A series of royal injunctions which followed carried out the same policy
of reform. Pilgrimages were suppressed; the excessive number of holy
days was curtailed; the worship of images and relics was discouraged in
words which seemed almost copied from the protest of Erasmus. His appeal
for a translation of the Bible which weavers might repeat at their
shuttle and ploughmen sing at their plough received at last a reply. At
the outset of the ministry of Norfolk and More, the King had promised an
English version of the Scriptures, while prohibiting the circulation of
Tyndale's Lutheran translation. The work, however, lagged in the hands
of the bishops; and as a preliminary measure the Creed, the Lord's
Prayer, and the Ten Commandments were now rendered into English, and
ordered to be taught by every schoolmaster and father of a family to his
children and pupils. But the bishops' version still hung on hand; till,
in despair of its appearance, a friend of Archbishop Cranmer, Miles
Coverdale, was employed to correct and re