uth. The Reformation in England was at its outset
political rather than doctrinal. The avarice and tyranny of the Church
officials had galled the limbs of the laity. Their first steps were to
break the chains which fretted them, and to put a final end to the
temporal power of the clergy. Spiritual liberty came later, and came
slowly from the constitution of the English mind. Superstition had been
familiarised by custom, protected by natural reverence, and shielded from
inquiry by the peculiar horror attaching to unbelief. The nation had been
taught from immemorial time that to doubt on the mysteries of faith was
the worst crime which man could commit; and while they were willing to
discover that on their human side the clergy were but brother mortals of
questionable character, they drew a distinction between the Church as a
national institution and the doctrines which it taught. An old creed could
not yield at once. The King did much; he protected individual Lutherans to
the edge of rashness. He gave the nation the English Bible. He made
Latimer a bishop. He took away completely and for ever the power of the
prelates to punish what they called heresy _ex officio_ and on their own
authority; but the zeal of the ultra-Protestants broke loose when the
restraint was taken off; the sense of the country was offended by the
irreverence with which objects and opinions were treated which they
regarded as holy, and Parliament, which had put a bit in the mouth of the
ecclesiastical courts, was driven to a substitute in the Bill of the Six
Articles. The advanced section in popular movements is usually unwise. The
characteristic excellence of the English Reformation is, that throughout
its course it was restrained by the law, and the Six Articles Bill,
tempered as it was in the execution, was a permissible, and perhaps
useful, measure in restraint of intemperance. It was the same in Germany.
Anabaptists continued to be burnt in Saxony and Hesse long after Luther's
revolt; Calvin thought the stake a fitting penalty for doubts upon the
Trinity. John Knox, in Scotland, approved of witch-burning and sending
mass-priests to the gallows. Henry could not disregard the pronounced
feeling of the majority of the English people. He was himself but one of
them, and changed slowly as they changed. Yet Protestant tradition has
assumed that the bloody whip with six strings was an act of arbitrary
ferocity. It considers that the King could, and ought