s partisans among
the clergy at home. In Cromwell's scheme for mastering the priesthood it
had been needful to place men on whom the King could rely at their head.
Cranmer became primate, Latimer became Bishop of Worcester, Shaxton and
Barlow were raised to the sees of Salisbury and St. David's, Hilsey to
that of Rochester, Goodrich to that of Ely, Fox to that of Hereford. But
it was hard to find men among the clergy who paused at Henry's
theological resting-place; and of these prelates all except Latimer were
known to sympathize with Lutheranism, though Cranmer lagged far behind
his fellows in their zeal for reform.

The influence of these men, as well as of an attempt to comply at least
partly with the demand of the German princes, left its stamp on the
articles of 1536. For the principle of Catholicism, of a universal form
of faith overspreading all temporal dominions, the Lutheran states had
substituted the principle of territorial religion, of the right of each
sovereign or people to determine the form of belief which should be held
within their bounds. The severance from Rome had already brought Henry
to this principle, and the Act of Supremacy was its emphatic assertion.

In England, too, as in North Germany, the repudiation of the papal
authority as a ground of faith, of the voice of the Pope as a
declaration of truth, had driven men to find such a ground and
declaration in the Bible; and the articles expressly based the faith of
the Church of England on the Bible and the three creeds. With such
fundamental principles of agreement it was possible to borrow from the
Augsburg Confession five of the ten articles which Henry laid before the
convocation. If penance was still retained as a sacrament, baptism and
the Lord's Supper were alone maintained to be sacraments with it; the
doctrine of transubstantiation, which Henry stubbornly maintained,
differed so little from the doctrine maintained by Luther that the words
of Lutheran formularies were borrowed to explain it; confession was
admitted by the Lutheran churches as well as by the English. The
veneration of saints and the doctrine of prayer to them, though still
retained, were so modified as to present little difficulty even to a
Lutheran.

However disguised in form, the doctrinal advance made in the articles of
1536 was an immense one; and a vehement opposition might have been
looked for from those of the bishops like Gardiner, who, while they
agreed with Hen