Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/298

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
274
CHURCH AND STATE UNDER THE TUDORS

earlier Puritans, and which made little or no progress for another half-century still. The evidence is simply overwhelming which shows, that during the whole period from 1552 onwards the English Church was considered, by friends and foes alike, to be for all intents and purposes one with the Swiss churches of Zurich and Geneva. The divines of the Church of England during the period in question differed, no doubt, among themselves on those minor points, which, as we have seen, were so nearly carried in favour of the Puritans in the Convocation of 1562; but their great anxieties were two only, viz., to shake themselves free from 'the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome and all his detestable enormities,'—to use word swhich once were sounded forth in all the churches in the land as one of the petitions in the Litany—and, secondly, to claim brotherhood and sympathy with the Protestant leaders in Switzerland and on the Upper Rhine. This remains true notwithstanding the equal truth of the fact that Henry VIII., who gave the first impulse to the Reformation in England, was no Protestant and no friend to Protestants. He had, as I have already suggested, been led on by circumstances to make further changes than he at first intended, and among them were those in parts of the Church Services from the use of the. Latin to that of the English language, the arranging of which he committed to Cranmer in 1545. These were the beginnings of the English Liturgy, and since there was at that time little or no design of a change in doctrine, it was natural that they should be, as they were, mainly translations from the Roman Breviary. It is doubtless this natural history of the Liturgy which accounts, in part at least, for the discrepancies which have been discovered between it and the Articles of the Church of England.