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But before we proceed, with Mr. Todd, to confront further the present extraordinary extracts with our own Homilies, as following in his next head of documental refer ence: it will be necessary to recal the attention of our readers again to dates and some historical circumstances. The present Necessary Erudition was, as we have seen, published in 1543, under Archbishop Cranmer's entire sanction and approval at least, if not his entire composition, (according to Mr. Todd), but (as we have seen from Collier) under the same archbishop, overruled and thwarted by many papistical spirits. Now whoever will take the trouble, once more, of turning to our fourth volume, pp. 198290, will find quotations from certain papers, preserved by Strype, and purporting to have been written at this very time, 1543, by Archbishop Cranmer, upon a review of the said Necessary Erudition; a book, indeed, sent to him for his revisal and comments, but on which it does not appear that his comments and observations were ever attended to or adopted. Two of these private papers are expressly given at length in our pages above referred to; and we presume a very cursory perusal of them will shew a most decided difference between the private sentiments and public expressions (to use our former words) of the Archbishop; though he may have been content with what he could do in such unfavourable times, since it was not in his power to do what he would have done. The following quotation from these papers, which is all we can find space for, will set the matter in a very strong light:-"And these works only which follow justification do please God; forasmuch as they proceed from a heart endued with pure faith and love to God. But the works which we do before our jus tification, be not allowed and acceptable before God, although they appear never so great and glorious

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in the sight of men. our justification only begin we to work as the law of God requireth: then we shall do all good works willingly, although not so exactly as the law requireth, &c. Now they that think they may come to justification by performance of the law, by their own deeds and merits, or by any other means than is above rehearsed*, they go from Christ, they renounce his grace." (Christ. Observ. Vol. IV. p. 200.)

It would afford matter for painful investigation were we to go into all the circumstances of Cranmer's difficult administration of church affairs, under King Henry the Eighth; and enumerate the many emergencies on which the wellmeaning Archbishop was forced, either into measures against his better judgment, or at least into a silence wholly uncongenial to his enlightened and candid mind. The single well-known concession in King Charles's works, that in Henry the Eighth's we are to look rather for the ground and occasion than the perfection or the doctrines of the Reformation, might give us some insight into the difficulties of our great Reformer. His own assertion, upon King Henry the Eighth's death, which happened three years after the publication of the Necessary Erudition, that the monarch was seduced into the adoption of it, might speak the same language. The detestable practice of asserting the corporal

That is, by "true repentance and fully returning to God," which necessarily lead through justification to good works. The first faith mentioned in these papers of Cranmer greatly resembles the dead faith mentioned in the Homilies, or the faith of devils, and is far from being "the beginning, entry, and introduction

to all religion." He makes it, indeed, common to all who are christened; but, we presume, devils and unbaptized persons might equally possess it. Here may appear some little inconsistency; and accordingly we do not find that in the more matured and now authorized Homilies, this first faith is made thechristening grace.

presence and other popish doctrines, by tortures and the stake, which was continued to the latest period of this king's reign, speaks on the same side; not to mention the continuance in force and effect, of the Six Bloody Popish Articles; on the ground of which Bishop Stanton submitted to church authority, and re-obtained his bishop. ric by subscribing to transubstantiation, auricular confession, and the liberty of man freely to use the power of his own will or choice, the Divine Prescience in predestination notwithstanding.

But the clearest of all proofs of the diversity between our great Reformer, when under the shackles of an horrible tyranny both of law and conscience, and the same man, when free to act according to the power of his own will and choice, will best appear by the proceedings immediately succeeding the death of King Henry the Eighth in 1546, and accompanying the publication of the really Protestant, and justly authorized Homilies of our own Church, from which Mr. Todd makes bis fourth head of selections. No sooner was the late king buried, than in the course of the year 1547, Collier informs us, "The privy council projected a further reformation, and resolved upon sending commissioners (in divisions) to all parts of the kingdom, by way of visitation. Every division had a preacher, whose business was to bring off the people from the remains of superstition, and to dispose them for the intended alterations. And, to make the impression of their doctrine more lasting, they were to lodge some Homilies, lately composed, with the parish priest. The argument of these discourses" was according to our present first book of Homilies, which, Collier adds, were drawn up mostly by Cranmer." (pp. 221, 222. Vol. II).

How then were these homilies, and initial preparations for further changes received? Gardner, Bishop

of Winchester, and too well known to need further designation, dissuades all alterations in religion: and, in a letter to the Protector, expresses a high degree of wonder that those "eminent prelates, who were made standing members of the Privy Council, and put in so high a place of trust by the late king, should so soon forget their old knowledge of Scripture, as set forth in the Necessary Erudition, and advise a change*." What follows upon this, as detailed in many snccessive pages by Collier, is surely far too obvious to have escaped the investigating eye of Mr. Todd: but for our readers' information, we must give a farther abstract. Gardner, observes Collier, continued on his stand against any further innovation; and, in a letter to Cranmer, expostulated most warmly against the imposition of new Homilies, wondering at Cranmer's affirming the late king was seduced, and that he knew who managed his Highness in setting forth the King's Majesty's book, i.e. the Necessary Erudition. "If the book contains truth, how seduced ? asks Gardner: if heterodoxies, how passed by your grace through the kingdom?" (See p. 225. vol. II.) Further on we find Gardner's reasonings at full length against Cranmer's positions, particularly those in the Homily of Salvation, penned by Cranmer. He mentions one of Cranmer's arguments, used to prove that only faith justifies-Then we are justified by faith without all works of the law. Charity is a work of the law. Therefore we are justified without charity. This argument Gardner undertakes to answer at his peril, provided Cranmer would send it

*Though he thus patronizes the Necessary Erudition against the projected changes, yet in the same letter, as Collier notes, he denies having had any share in the composition of that book,having been (as we think Burnet, in his odd way, re marks)" out of town at the time;" but surely for no better reason.

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under his own hand. Further, he takes notice, that whether faith justifies exclusively of charity or not, signifies nothing as to practice; because all men are justified in the sacrament of Baptism. And since we have all received the advantage of justification in our infancy, when we were in no condition to dispute about the means, why start the question, and lay so much stress upon it ?*

Mr. Collier, who is much of Mr. Todd's opinion in the controversy itself of faith and works, proceeds in a subsequent passage very remarkably. "Had the bishop (Gardner) appeared in the house, it is probable he might have given the court party some trouble, and,' it may be, overset Cranmer in the dispute on justification. The Archbishop, and those of his persuasion, founded themselves on the fourth of Romans and third of Galatians : but it is plain by the tenor of these Epistles, that by faith we are to understand the new covenant in the terms required in the Gospel, in contradistinction to the observances of the Mosaic Law, which, in the language of the Scripture, are called workst. However, Cranmer

It is lamentable to reflect that the self-same argument, nearly totidem verbis, is to be found in a Protestant writer, and one of no less note than the able Waterland, in his discourse on Justification. The reply is most obvious; the same process supposed in baptism, in be. half of the infant, must be effectuated in after life by its own rational faith. Collier notes that, upon this occasion, Fox calls Winchester an insensible ass, and that he had no feeling of God's Spirit in the matter of justification. We beg leave to assure our readers, that we think no such title applicable to Waterland.

+ If it were a time to discuss a long and worn-out question, it would be sufficient to say, that this exclusive confinement of the term "works" to the Mosaic Law, never has been, nor could be carried through the whole of St. Paul's Epistles, by any commentator who ever wrote. Locke, to mention no other, decidedly makes them to mean the works of the moral law,

and the Lutherans had a pious meaning at the bottom of their notion." (p. 233.)

With the circumstances of this history, which we presume are sufficiently notorious, upon our minds, we come fully prepared to admit Mr. Todd's able and novel reasoning, drawn from a novel source, in proof of Cranmer's real authorship, as regards those important Homilies of our church, on Salvation, Faith, The following and Good Works. quotation, from Mr. Todd's Introduction, will afford a very satisfactory confirmation of all that Collier and Strype have hinted on this subject before.

"John Woolton, the nephew of the celebrated Alexander Nowell, was the author of several theological works in He was a the reign of Elizabeth.

canon residentiary of the church of Exeter, and afterwards bishop of that

see.

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Wood describes him as a person of great piety and reason, and an earnest assertor of conformity against the opposers thereof, for which he was blamed by many, but commended by more, after his death.' In 1576, not long before he was advanced to the prelacy, he published The Christian Manuell, or the Life and Manners of True Christians,' 12mo. Herein he says, • What with manly eloquence, teache and thinke of Good Workes, those Homelies written in our Englishe tounge of Salvation, Faith, and Workes, by that lyght and martyr of Christes churche, Cranmer, Archebyshoppe of Canterburie, doo playne testifye and declare; which are buylt upon so sure a foundation, that no sycophant can deface them, nor sophyster confute them, whyle the worlde shall endure: unto whom I remytte the reader desyrous of an absolute dyscourse in this matter.' Living so very near the time when Cranmer flourished, of such distinguished character in the church, and to this day not contradicted in his plain assertion, Bishop Woolton therefore appears to me an evidence, in this case, of indisputable authority.

"It is to the first of these Homilies that the framers of our Articles of Religion, both in the time of Edward the Sixth and of Elizabeth, refer; though under the name of the Homily of Justification' our reformers, it has been

observed, understanding the terms jus tification and salvation as equivalent. "The First Book of Homilies was published in 1547. The earliest copy, how ever, which I have met with, bears the date of 1548. This I have followed in the present publication; not without noticing the several variations from it (in the Homilies cited), which first appeared in the reign of Elizabeth, when it was re-published with the 'Second Book of Homilies.' It is due to the memory of the prelate, as well as to the cause of sound criticism, that his own words be not overpassed. They have been often altered, it will be seen, with little judgment." pp. xiii, xiv, xv.

Mr. Todd thus assists us in ascertaining the date of the first publication of Cranmer's Homilies, in the First Book, to be as early as 1547, or 48; that is, immediately on the death of King Henry the Eighth. But it would be surely a misapplication of our readers' time and attention, to follow Mr. Todd further through his extracts from, or rather his reprint of, these Homilies, extending from p. 47, to p. 110, edit. 1548; as the nature of them will be sufficiently anticipated from all we have now said; and our extracts can only afford an accumulated proof to demonstration, by the most evident contradictions, that the Necessary Erudition did not contain Cranmer's real, unvarnished, unperverted, or most matured sentiments on Justification, or Salvation, on Faith, or Good Works.

Mr. Todd seems to dwell with much point upon an identity in the use made by our ancient fathers of the terms justification and salvation. They used them as synonimous, as appears from the title of the Homily on Salvation, being given by our Article as one on Justification; and this he considers the Calvinist cannot consistently admit *. It seems to us

"It has been observed that our first reformers must have understood the terms 'justification' and 'salvation' as equivalent. For whereas they refer to the Homily on Justification' in their 11th Article, there is, in fact, no such

that the Calvinist is just the person who can do it, since he most strongly holds, that in the Divine purpose, whom God "justifies, them he also glorifies," or finally saves. Those who are once in a state of actual justification by true faith, will be also essentially considered as in a state of sure salvation. Mr. Todd has not particularly mentioned the light under which he offers his own remark; but we are led to notice it, because it appears to us, on the contrary, essential to his views, and for those entertained in the Necessary Erudition respecting faith and justification, to hold that justification and salvation are essentially different; though, perhaps, he might maintain that works in order to justification cannot be conceived to merit justification, yet he would probably assert, that those done with a view to increase that justification, and cause it to "wax," may be meritoriously available towards the attainment of everlasting salvation. For our own part, we most certainly hold that neither for our present acceptance into God's favour, nor our final entrance into his heavenly kingdom, are works, either before or after the act of justifying faith, meritoriously available. And if we ever felt more confirmed in this position at one time than at another, as the doctrine of our invaluable church, sanctioned by the wisdom of ages, it is at the moment of rising from a diligent and careful perusal of the admirable Homilies presented to us inthe presentvolume, as they are seen in immediate contrast with the crude,undigested, and, we are bold to say, indigestible materials of the preceding Necessary Homily precisely with that title. The Homily they meant, is that of Salvation. And, therefore, it is obvious to the meanest capacity, that they made no such idle distinctions between the conditions of justification, and those of sal-, vation, as a Calvinist must necessarily make. They thought, that that which justified, did also save; and that that which saved, did also justify.' Dean Tucker, Letter to Dr. Kippis, p. 110.” Todd, p. 47.

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Erudition. Whilst in this most unnecessary book we found in every page something that perplexed, and staggered, and darkened, and shocked us; we found in the succeeding pages all that enlightened, consoled, and confirmed us in the faith. It may be through the force of prejudice, but we trust it is not in a spirit of controversy, and we are sure not without much deliberation, that we say, we see not a material expression in the whole course of these authorized Homilies that we could wish to have altered: not one that does not speak our own full and matured conviction; one that does not lead us plainly and strongly, and fully to Christ alone for justification through faith, rejecting alike all merit both of faith and works; and that does not send us away from bis Divine Presence with our hearts warmed with love towards bim, animated with zeal, and spurred to every noble and generous resolution of obedience in his cause. Here we discover neither penance with its contrition, auricular confession, and satisfaction, nor the obscure notions of initial works and prefatory credence, before justification. Here we find every thing excluded, and even faith itself, as the meritorious cause either of justification or salvation; and the plain and direct assurance, that if we have faith, we shall necessarily walk in good works, and all holy obedience. We have here the utmost pains taken to separate faith from all other works in the act of justification, and from charity amongst them; and the case of the thief on the cross, expressly alleged to prove justification without works. We find, in short, every thing put upon its right basis; and we tread on sure and firm ground, and rejoice as we tread it, because we there see the only strong and irrefragable argument for an holy life and godly conversation. We rejoice, in a word, because we are clearly off the ground of Popery,

and stand on the sure basis of Protestant principles: we lose sight of the affected, conditional, and cruel charities of the Romish Church, and expatiate in the wide and boundless plains of a scriptural faith which worketh by love*. We trust we have sufficiently redeemed our pledge given at the beginning, of confronting our present Homilies with the unnecessary book of Erudition, so mistakenly, as we think, commended by Mr. Todd. Our confined limits have induced us to give no more extracts; and we doubt not our readers have, or ought to have, the means of comparing particular passages in our authorized formularies, with those which we have given from the Erudition. We, at present, add only further, in recapitulation, that we believe, in full contrariety to Mr. Todd's opinion, that neither the Articles of 1536, nor the Institution of 1537, nor the Six Articles of 1540, nor the Necessary Erudition of 1543, nor its Latin translation in 1544, formed any criterion whatever of Cranmer's distinct and matured views on the subjects above-mentioned; nor do they afford in general more than the most imperfect, rude, and defective lineaments of the doctrines of the Reformation. We have no hesitation in saying, from history, that Cranmer regretted many things which are now brought forward as a guide to his true opinions: and so clear is our conviction, from the authorities we have quoted, that

It is a curious and characteristic co

incidence, that when Ridley and Latimer were brought to the stake, the text chosen by Vice-Chancellor Smith, to greet them to the flames, was the foling: "Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." This was surely a notable sneer at those venerable reform

ers, in the very moment of martyrdom, for their notions of justification by faith only, and a happy illustration of the popish preacher's notion of adding charity to faith in the business of justification!

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