Chapter VIII. Theological Views and Controversies

PURE theology occupies a smaller space in Cranmer’s life than in that of other great Reformers, such as Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin; he founded no church and gave his name to no doctrinal system. His work was rather to reform a church, and he laboured under conditions unlike those which determined the thoughts and actions of his contemporaries in Europe. No one will dispute the vast importance of the religious issues which agitated civilisation in the sixteenth century, but it is impossible to understand the history of that epoch if it is treated from an exclusively theological point of view. Religious forces are potent indeed, but it is doubtful whether religion has fashioned nationality so much as nationality has moulded religion. If religion had been the one supreme test, it would have divided Europe into Catholic and Protestant parties, and not into Catholic and Protestant nations. Religion, in fact, was not so dominant in the sixteenth as it had been in the twelfth century, and the age was really one of secularisation. There was no Crusade, nor in any single instance was there an effective coalition of Catholic or of Protestant powers for any object whatever; and when wars of religion did come in the seventeenth century, it was France a Catholic power, which caused the Protestant victory. Political conditions exercised incalculable influence over the results of the religious movement ; Protestantism broke in vain against the national temper of Spain, and it was national feeling in Germany which gave effect to Luther’s protest. Political conditions, too, differentiated the Reformation in England from that in Germany and in Switzerland. Zwinglianism and Calvinism are republican because the Swiss cantons were republics; Lutheranism became a territorial religion because territorialism was the effective political principle then existent in Germany. The Church in England became the Church of England because a strong national monarchy grasped the sceptre which was slipping from the hands of the Papal hierarchy.

The predominance of the State in England was unfavourable to the influence of the Church and to the free development of religious speculation, while the loose and impotent political organisation of Switzerland and Germany stimulated independent thought. There the seat of authority was, if not empty, poorly filled; and in the early years of the Reformation, at least, its direction fell into the hands of religious leaders. Hence Luther and Zwingli were able to develop a theology which would soon have been checked in England. Their rulers were weak and not theologians. Henry VIII. was strong and a theologian with emphatic views of his own. In England a reformation could only be effected by the State and through the instrumentality of an Archbishop, who was not merely Primate of the Church but constitutionally the first adviser of the Crown; a position which, while it conferred honour and dignity, also imposed restraints. It not only bounded his liberty of action, but affected his point of view. To Luther truth could be the only consideration; Cranmer had also to consider how truth could be translated into action and imposed on a doubting people; to him compromise was essential, for he was a statesman as well as a theologian; he lived and moved in a practical sphere in which ideals and abstractions could play but a limited part.

Another difference arises from this process of reformation by government instrumentality. Luther’s Ninety-five Theses were his own individual act; the Confession of Augsburg was the work of Melanchthon; but the Ten and the Forty-two Articles, the First and Second Books of Common Prayer, were the acts of a government and not the manifestoes of an individual or even of a party. In these documents Cranmer’s voice sounded the dominant note, but all in varying degrees are of composite authorship and represent the working of several minds. Like the policy of modern cabinets, they may not embody any one man’s ideal, and caution should be observed in any attempt to deduce therefrom the nature of private convictions. Particularly is this the case when the expressions of this composite and collective opinion are directed primarily towards the reformation of abuses and regulation of worship, and not towards the definition of dogma. Had the Reformation in England been guided by Calvin or Luther, or by a series of ecclesiastical councils, it might have produced religious war, but would probably have propagated a more definite theological system. A layman is not necessarily a bad theologian, but a statesman must economise truth and compound with the forces of darkness.

Circumstances thus turned Cranmer away from abstract speculation, and on its speculative and philosophical side his theology is not distinctive. Metaphysics lay quite beyond his mental horizon; and he has little or nothing to say on the tremendous issues involved in the relations between the will of man and the will of God. Probably he thought these vast realms a trackless waste on which it would be rash to enter. Caution was a marked characteristic of Cranmer’s typically English mind; although it was open to many influences, no single idea took exclusive possession; truth shone into it through various media, and the light it received was a blend less clear but more soft than the rays which pierced the brain of Luther or Calvin. The same is true of Anglican doctrine; the strict alliance of Church and State was by no means an unmixed blessing, but it acted as some protection from the fierce glare of some theological dogmas; and when Lutheran, Zwinglian, and, lastly, Calvinistic rays did break in upon the English Church they were so combined and modified that a sort of spectrum analysis is required to distinguish them one from another. And if the light was moderate, the heat was also less; for the passion which loosed England from Rome was a political sentiment rather than a religious enthusiasm like that aroused by Predestination or Justification by Faith; and Cranmer’s theology by itself would not have generated sufficient force to drive the engine of Reform.

Cranmer himself appears to have reached his convictions by the intellectual path of reason rather than through the sensational “experiences” which led to Luther’s revolt. His repugnance to the old religious system did not, it would seem, arise from its failure to satisfy the spiritual needs of a clamant conscience, but from the dissonance between the Scriptures and the Papacy. It was the study of the Scriptures and not the wrestling of the spirit that first aroused Cranmer’s doubts. To the Scriptures he had devoted his time from his early days at Cambridge, and throughout his life their influence over his mind was ever-increasing. His career was a troubled but constant journeying away from the papal towards the evangelical position; and the decrees of Popes and of General Councils, and even the words of the Fathers, gradually receded into the distance. Yet Cranmer never reached the extreme of Zwinglianism. He did not condemn all that was not in the Bible, for an Archbishop could scarcely do that with consistency; and he had little patience with those who objected to kneeling because it was not enjoined in the Scriptures. So, too, he always attached a great, though lessening, value to the Fathers as interpreters of the words of Christ and of the Apostles.

The Bible was Cranmer’s Ark of the Covenant, and his lack of the speculative instinct saved him from the temptation to lay impious hands upon it. He could make effective use of the contradictions between the various decrees of the Popes; but he seems to have been happily blind to the difficulties presented by the text of the Scriptures. In this respect he was less acute or less frank than Luther, who admitted the discrepancies between the Synoptists and the Gospel of St. John, and between Stephen’s account of Jewish history and that recorded in the Old Testament.¹ Still farther was Cranmer from the mental attitude of Carlstadt, who doubted the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and believed that the original form of the Gospels had not been preserved intact.² His interest in textual criticism of the Scriptures was conditioned by the support which it gave to attacks on the Papacy. This was the natural position for a practical man engaged in a life-and-death struggle; it is scarcely the business of such an one to exhibit the defects in the weapon with which he defended himself and attacked his enemies; and Cranmer was too busy wielding the sword of the Gospel to spend much time in displaying its flaws.

The application of the Scriptural test to the problems of the time was with Cranmer a slow and gradual development; but it was none the less an independent process, anterior to and not consequent upon the action of the State. For years before the divorce of Catherine of Aragon he had prayed for the abolition of the papal jurisdiction; and before the Government had taken any action with regard to the doctrine or the practice of the Church, his faith in papal theology had gone the way of his respect for papal law. Whether his visit to Rome in 1530 produced as deep an impression as Luther’s did, we do not know; but at least it did nothing to alter the tendencies of his mind. It is obvious that in 1532 he no longer believed in compulsory celibacy for the clergy; and his intercourse with the Lutheran divines during his embassy to Germany in that year had probably confirmed his doubts of other orthodox views. As soon as he became Archbishop he began to agitate for an authorised version of the Scriptures in English, and the Ten Articles of 1536 were evidence of the distance he had already travelled from later Catholic doctrine. He had in 1537 already rejected the abuses of “Purgatory, pilgrimages, praying to saints, images, holy bread, holy water, holy days, merits, works, ceremony, and such other.”¹

Of these changes the most important was the denial of Purgatory, for it was belief in its existence and in the power of the clergy to redeem men’s souls from its pains that gave the Roman Church its hold over the popular mind. The claim was not capable of practical or ocular refutation; and the fear that, however successfully the priest might be restrained in this world, he might have the last word in the other, was, next to the impression that the priest was endowed with the miraculous power of “making God,” the greatest obstacle in the path of the Reformation. Hence the importance of Luther’s dogma of Justification by Faith, which made priestly intercession a work of supererogation; and hence that dogma was so far accepted by the English Church as to undermine the belief in Purgatory. Cranmer himself went farther in this direction than most English Reformers, and the views he expressed in 1547 in his Homily of Salvation¹ are scarcely distinguishable from Luther’s own; “faith,” he wrote, “doth not exclude repentance, hope, love, dread, and the fear of God, to be joined with faith in every man that is justified, but it excludeth them from the office of justifying. … Nor that faith also doth not exclude the justice of good works, necessarily to be done afterward of duty towards God … but it excludeth them, so that we may not do them to this intent, to be made good by doing of them.”

Cranmer’s attitude towards other theological questions (except the Eucharist) may best be indicated by summarising his replies to the series of interrogations put to the bishops by Henry VIII. about 1541.² He did not materially vary from the position he then held, and his answers illustrate not only the difference between him and the Roman Catholics, but that between him and both High and Free churchmen of to-day. With regard to the nature, number, and authority of the sacraments he said that the Scriptures “sheweth not what a sacrament is,” nor how many sacraments there were; while the “ancient doctors” described a sacrament as sacrœ rei signum, visibile verbum, symbolum, atque pactio, quâ sumus constricti, and applied the name to many more than the orthodox seven; he knew no reason why the word should be attributed to the seven only, for that number of seven was “no doctrine of Scripture, nor of the old authors.” Questioned whether the thing was there, though the name was absent, he replied that Baptism and the Eucharist were the only two things in Scripture which could be regarded as sacraments ; penance was in Scripture “a pure conversion of a sinner in heart and mind,” and there was no mention of its conventional tripartite division into contrition, confession, and satisfaction; matrimony, confirmation, and extreme unction were not sacraments; nor was there any allusion in Scripture to “confirmation with chrism, without which it is counted no sacrament.”

The interrogations then pass on to the debatable ground of the ecclesiastical power of princes. Was it for lack of commission from a Christian king that the Apostles took upon them to make bishops? or had they authority given of God? Cranmer drew up a long reply. All Christian princes, he said, have committed to them immediately of God the whole cure of all their subjects, as well concerning the administration of God’s Word for the cure of the soul as concerning the ministration of things political and civil governance.¹ So under them they have both civil and ecclesiastical ministers, who are appointed by their laws and orders. In the admission of many of these officers divers comely ceremonies and solemnities were used, but they were not necessary, and their omission would not invalidate the appointment; nor was there any more divine promise of grace to be given “in the committing of the ecclesiastical office” than in that of the civil office. It was the lack of authority from a Christian king that compelled the Apostles to appoint ministers of God’s Word.

To further questions Cranmer answered that in the beginning there was no distinction between priest and bishop, and that while a bishop might make priests, so might princes and governors, “and the people also by their election.” “In the New Testament he that is appointed to be a Bishop or Priest needeth no consecration by the Scripture, for election or appointing thereto is sufficient”; a Christian prince was also bound, in case ecclesiastics failed, to teach and preach the Word of God and to make and constitute priests. A man was not bound by Scripture “to confess his secret deadly sins to a priest”; nor did Scripture command or forbid a bishop or priest to excommunicate; such powers depended entirely upon the laws of the country where he lived.

Many of these points are of merely antiquarian or academic interest, and their importance is slight compared with that of Cranmer’s views on the Eucharist. The doctrine of Transubstantiation he had abandoned early, though the exact date of the change cannot be ascertained. In 1538 he wrote to Cromwell¹:

“As concerning Adam Damplip of Calais, he utterly denieth that ever he taught or said that the very body and blood of Christ was not presently in the sacrament of the altar, and confesseth the same to be there really; but he saith that the controversy between him and the prior was because he confuted the opinion of transubstantiation, and therein I think he taught but the truth.’

But he was yet far from the Zwinglian position;

“for,” he wrote in 1537² to the Zwinglian J. de Watt, “unless I see stronger evidence brought forward than I have yet been able to see, I desire neither to be the patron nor the approver of the opinion maintained by you. And I am plainly convinced … that the cause is not a good one.”

The doctrine of the Real Presence was, he thought, proved by “evident and manifest passages of Scriptures,” and “handed down to us by the Fathers themselves and men of apostolical character from the very beginning of the Church”; and “our gracious Lord would never have left his beloved spouse in such lamentable blindness for so long a period.”

The last was a two-edged argument for a Reformer to use, and the time came when Cranmer himself rejected the Real Presence in spite of the manifest passages in Scripture, the Fathers, and men of apostolical character. This development was, however, slow, and its history has been obscured by a remark of Cranmer’s during his examination before Bishop Brooks in 1555.¹ “You, master Cranmer,” said Dr. Martin² to him, “have taught in this high sacrament of the altar three contrary doctrines, and yet you protested in every one verbum Domini.” “Nay,” replied Cranmer, “I taught but two contrary doctrines”; and his remark has been considered³ a decisive refutation of the idea that he had passed through a Lutheran phase in his transition from papal to Zwinglian doctrine. It is perhaps a little loose to identify the High Anglican doctrine of the Real Presence with the Lutheran dogma of Consubstantiation; but that Cranmer at one time believed in the Real Presence while he disbelieved in Transubstantiation is certain. That is the only inference possible from his letters to Cromwell and Watt quoted above; and in the preface to his Answer to Dr. Richard Smith he wrote that he was “in that error of the Real Presence, as I was many years past in divers other errors, as of Transubstantiation,” thus clearly distinguishing between the two. His answer to Dr. Martin may have been misreported, or his memory may have deceived him; but there is a third explanation. Proceeding to define the two “contrary doctrines” he had taught, he indicates “the Papists’ doctrine” as one, and the view he then held as the other. He had come to regard the Real Presence no less than Transubstantiation as “Papists’ doctrine,” and the same identification is made in the preface to his answer to Gardiner.

Yet Cranmer would not have called the Real Presence “Papists’ doctrine” at any time between 1538 and 1548. He believed it himself throughout that decade, and assuredly he then was no papist. Down to the eve of the debate on the Sacrament in December, 1548, he was regarded by the Zwinglians as a lukewarm Lutheran, though nearly a year before he had described the mass as “a memory and representation,” ¹ and the description of him as a Lutheran merely means that he was neither papist nor Zwinglian. The means of Cranmer’s conversion have been already discussed²; the results were apparent in the debate on the Sacrament and in Cranmer’s controversies with Bishop Gardiner and with Dr. Richard Smith; in these books he gives the fullest account of his belief on the question and of the reasons which led him to hold it.

The First Book of Common Prayer had embodied a compromise on the Eucharist between the views of Cranmer and those of the Catholic bishops. The phraseology employed was capable of a Catholic and of a Protestant interpretation, and both sides asserted that theirs was the only true gloss. But the political events of 1549 had substituted an aggressive for an accommodating government, and it was with the good wishes if not at the instigation of the ruling Protestants that Cranmer set to work to prove that the Protestant view was correct. His book was entitled A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament, and it was published in 1550.¹ In it Cranmer took occasion to impugn some assertions made by the Bishop of Winchester in his sermon before the King on 30 June, 1548, and Gardiner, although he was now in prison, found means to take up the cudgels in his own defence. His book was entitled An Explication and Assertion of the True Catholic Faith touching the most blessed Sacrament of the Altar with Confutation of a book Written against the Same. Gardiner affected to believe that the Defence, although published under Cranmer’s name, was not by him because it was inconsistent with the views which the Archbishop had previously expressed on the subject. Another attack on Cranmer was made by Dr. Richard Smith, who is extravagantly described by Anthony Wood as “the greatest pillar of the Roman Catholic cause in his time.”¹ The Archbishop replied to both in An Answer, published in 1551, in which are also incorporated his original treatise and Gardiner’s rejoinder. The whole volume is more than three times the size of this present one, so that it is impossible to follow even in outline the threads of Cranmer’s argument or to do more than give a brief indication of his conclusions.

From the point of view of mental equipment Gardiner was scarcely a match for the Archbishop. He had no claim to Cranmer’s learning, and although, as he acknowledges, his skill in debate had earned him the name of “sophister,” he complains that Cranmer overcame him with sophistry; and Sir Thomas More had once confessed himself staggered by the subtlety of Cranmer’s arguments. Nevertheless Gardiner had a great deal of rough common sense, and he presented the Catholic view with no little ability, and considerable moderation. “I know,” he writes,¹ “by faith Christ to be present [in the sacrament], but the particularity how he is present, more than I am assured he is truly present, and therefore in substance present I cannot tell; but present he is, and truly is and verily is, and … therefore in substance is, and, as we term it, substantially is present.” The words in italics represent the position which Cranmer challenged ; and they have the merit of avoiding the vague term real. For spiritual things are as real as things material; and in this sense Cranmer strenuously asserted the Real Presence in the Sacrament. “As for the real presence of Christ in the Sacrament,” he writes, “I grant that he is really present … that is to say in deed, and yet but spiritually.”² That real did not involve a corporal presence; and Gardiner’s therefore begged the question. “Doth not God’s word,” asked Cranmer, “teach a true presence of Christ in spirit where he is not present in his corporal substance? As when he saith: ‘where two or three be gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ And also when he saith: ‘I shall be with you till the end of the world.’ Was it not a true presence that Christ in these places promised? And yet can you not of this true presence gather such a corporal presence of the substance of Christ’s manhood as you unlearnedly contrary to the Scriptures go about to prove in the sacrament.”³

Cranmer’s thesis is, “that as no Scripture, so no ancient author known and approved hath in plain terms your transubstantiation; nor that the body and blood of Christ be really, corporally, naturally, and carnally under the forms of bread and wine; nor that evil men do eat the very body and drink the very blood of Christ; nor that Christ is offered every day by the priest a sacrifice propitiatory for sin.”¹ His doctrine, he maintained, “was never condemned by no council, nor your false papistical doctrine allowed, until the devil caused Antichrist, his son and heir, Pope Nicholas II.,² with his monks and friars, to condemn the truth and confirm these your heresies.”³ Elsewhere he declares that Pope Innocent III. was “the chief author of your doctrine both of transubstantiation and of the real presence.”⁴ By “real presence” Cranmer generally means a corporal presence, which Luther asserted when he declared that “the mouth eats the body of Christ bodily.” Cranmer believed “that Christ giveth himself truly to be eaten, chewed, and digested; but all is spiritually with faith, not with the mouth.”⁵ Here was a clear repudiation of Lutheran doctrine, and Gardiner made a good forensic use of the discrepancy between the two Reformers. He complained that the Archbishop sought to prejudice his opponent’s case by calling the Real Presence a Papistical dogma, whereas others held it who were no Papists,—for instance, Luther and himself. Cranmer retorted that he called it Papists’ doctrine because Papists invented it, not because Papists and no one else believed in it; and he pointed out that Luther was not a good witness for Gardiner to allege, because Luther, while holding the Real Presence, denounced more emphatically than any other Reformer the doctrine of Transubstantiation, in which Gardiner believed.

Having thus repudiated both Lutherans and Papists, Cranmer showed that he did not sympathise with the extreme Zwinglian view, that the bread and wine were “bare tokens,” and nothing more. “They be,” he writes,¹ “no vain or bare tokens (for a token is that which betokeneth only and giveth nothing, as a painted fire, which giveth neither light nor heat); but in the due ministration of the sacraments God is present, working with his word and sacrament.” The bread and wine “have promises of effectual significance.”² “As the bread is outwardly eaten indeed in the Lord’s supper, so is the very body of Christ inwardly by faith eaten indeed of all them that come thereto in such sort as they ought to do, which eating nourisheth them into everlasting life.”³ “I do not say that Christ’s body and blood be given to us in signification, and not in deed. But I do as plainly speak as I can, that Christ’s body and blood be given to us in deed, yet not corporally and carnally, but spiritually and effectually.”⁴

This is the gist of Cranmer’s teaching. There is both a real presence and a miraculous working in the sacrament; but both the presence and the working are spiritual, not material. Christ is present in His divinity, not in His humanity¹; He is really absent in body, for that is in heaven, but He is really present in spirit; “Christ is with us spiritually present, is eaten and drunken of us, and dwelleth within us, although corporally he be departed out of this world, and is ascended up into heaven”²; “He is neither corporally in the bread and wine, nor in or under the forms and figures of them, but is corporally in heaven, and spiritually in his lively members, which be his temple where he inhabiteth.”³ So, too, “the miraculous working is not in the bread, but in them that duly eat the bread, and drink that drink … For he is effectually present and effectually worketh, not in the bread and wine, but in the godly receivers of them.”⁴ “And the true eating and drinking of the said body and blood of Christ is with a constant and lively faith to believe that Christ gave his body and shed his blood upon the cross for us, and that he doth so join and incorporate himself to us that he is our head, and we his members, and flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone, having him dwelling in us and we in him. And herein standeth the whole effect and strength of this sacrament. And this faith God worketh inwardly in our hearts by his holy Spirit.”⁵ The best summing up of Cranmer’s views may also be given in his own words; “figuratively he is the bread and wine, and spiritually he is in them that worthily eat and drink the bread and wine; but really, carnally, and corporally he is only in heaven, from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”¹

These words represent Cranmer’s mature opinion,² from which he only varied during some six weeks in 1556; and when that moment of weakness had passed he returned to the position here indicated, and in his last hour declared that he believed as he had taught in his book against the Bishop of Winchester. His view of the Sacrament has been denounced as a “low” one; but the only ground for the charge is the fact that Cranmer’s doctrine reduces the importance of the priest as an intercessor between God and man, and emphasises the direct as against the indirect relationship. The Sacrament still remains a miracle, but it is a miracle wrought by God and not by priests, a miracle feeding the souls of men, and not transforming material bread and wine, a miracle relating not to the things seen which are temporal, but to the unseen things which are eternal.

The denial of this material miracle wrought by the hands of priests struck at the root of the mediaeval Church system, and it is for this reason that the religious controversies of the sixteenth century centred round the doctrine of the Mass. The sacerdotal claim had always been that the grace of God flows only through priestly channels, and that none could be saved except by resort to the priestly monopoly. Hence came clerical privilege and clerical rule; “shall the hands that have made God,” asked indignant churchmen in the time of Henry II., “be bound like those of a common malefactor?” Cranmer denied that the hands of the priest could “make God”; and therefore the whole superstructure fell to the ground. But this denial was the only means of its overthrow.

“What availeth it,” he asked in his preface, “to take away beads, pardons, pilgrimages, and such like popery, so long as the two chief roots remain unpulled up? Whereof, so long as they remain, will spring again all former impediments of the Lord’s harvest, and corruption of his flock. The rest is but branches and leaves, the cutting away whereof is but like topping and lopping of a tree, or cutting down of weeds, leaving the body standing and the roots in the ground; but the very body of the tree, or rather the roots of the weeds, is the popish doctrine of transubstantiation, of the real presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the sacrament of the altar (as they call it), and of the sacrifice and oblation of Christ made by the priest for the salvation of the quick and the dead; which roots, if they be suffered to grow in the Lord’s vineyard, they will overspread all the ground again with the old errors and superstitions.”

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¹ H. E. Jacobs, Luther, p. 351.

² For Andrew Bodenstein, or Carlstadt, see the present writer in Cambridge Modern, History, ii., 165.

¹ Cranmer, Works, ii., 351.

¹ This homily is printed in Works, ii., 128–134; Cranmer was almost certainly its author. His “Notes on Justification,” consisting of passages from the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the Schoolmen, are printed in Works, ii., 203–211, and in Jenkyns, ii., 121 et sqq.

² Burnet, iv., 443–496.

¹ These views appeared to be derived from Marsiglio of Padua who anticipated by two centuries the Tudor theory of Church and State (cf. Dunning, Ancient and Mediæval Political Theory, pp. 242–3). Marsiglio’s Defensor Pacis was printed in England in 1536, with Cromwell’s approbation (see the present writer in D. N. B., s. v. “Marshall, William,” xxxvi., 250).

¹ Works, ii., 375.

² Ibid., ii., 343.

¹ Foxe, viii., 56.

² Thomas Martyn, or Martin, was a zealous Roman Catholic civilian who took a prominent part in the proceedings against the Marian martyrs; he was, however, unmolested in Elizabeth’s reign, and was even given some legal work by the Government; see D. N. B., xxxvi., 320.

³ Wordsworth, Eccl. Biogr., iii., 550; cf. Jenkyns iv., 95, and Cranmer, Works, ii., 215.

¹ Burnet, v., 201.

² See above, p. 216.

¹ The origin of his book is also attributed to the publication of Gardiner’s Detection of the Devil’s Sophistry, a treatise against Protestant views of the sacrament, but this had been published four years before in 1546. A Latin version of the Defence by Sir J. Cheke was published abroad in 1553.

¹ Smith had been first Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford; he repudiated his Romanism in 1547, but in 1549 had a famous argument on the Sacrament at Oxford with Peter Martyr. He then fled to Louvain, whence his answer to Cranmer was published. He was restored to his professorship under Mary, and preached at Latimer and Ridley’s martyrdom from the text, “If I give my body to be burnt, and have not charity, it profiteth nothing.” The fact suggests that Smith himself had little charity; neither did he give his body to be burnt, but again recanted in 1559, was deprived of his professorship on the ground of adultery, and was made chancellor of Douay University ; see D. N. B., liii., 101–102.

¹ Cranmer, Works, i., 59.

² Ibid., i., 127.

³ Ibid., i., 61.

¹ Works, i., 13.

² Nicholas II. was Pope from 1058 to 1061.

³ Works, i., 14.

⁴ Ibid i., 65; Innocent was Pope from 1198 to 1216.

⁵ Ibid., i., 15; the eating of God as a means of salvation was not, of course, originally a Christian idea; it is found in some very primitive religions.

¹ Works, i., 11.

² Ibid., i., 17.

³ Ibid., i., 36.

⁴ Ibid., i., 37.

¹ Works, i., 49.

² Ibid., i., 12; cf. p. 52.

³ Ibid., i., 53–54.

⁴ Ibid., i., 34.

⁵ Ibid., i., 43.

¹ Works, i., 139.

² Gardiner again replied to this book of Cranmer’s in 1552, and the Archbishop was engaged on a further rejoinder when death cut short his work under Queen Mary; see below, p. 357. Another controversial work attributed to Cranmer is A Confutation of Unwritten Verities, which was published by an English exile, E. P., in 1558, and professed to be a translation from a Latin original by Cranmer; but the only part that Cranmer appears to have had in the work was that it is based on a collection of passages from the Scriptures and the Fathers compiled by the Archbishop and preserved among his commonplace-books in the British Museum (Royal MS., 7, B. xi., xii.). It has been admitted into the various editions of Cranmer’s Works, but Jenkyns is very doubtful as to its claim to be his, and remarks that “it cannot be safely quoted as evidence of Cranmer’s tenets.”

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