the title of the English Articles' as published by Grafton, in 1553, they are said to have been constructed with reference to certain matters of religion,' and in all the copies, for the establishment of a godly concord and the avoiding of controversies' apparently agitated at the time2. Two of them (the eighth and the thirty-seventh) deny the errors of the Anabaptists upon original sin and a community of goods; four others (from the thirty-ninth to the forty-second) are directed against as many forms of misbelief affecting the resurrection, the state of the dead, the millenarian. hypothesis, and the ultimate salvation of all men: the eighteenth anathematises all those who wilfully deny the necessity of the Gospel: while the twelfth and thirteenth reject 'the doctrine of the school-men3," touching human merit and works of supererogation; and the twenty-third touching purgatory, indulgences, and other tenets which were in like manner strenuously defended by the anti-reformation party. 1 This translation, according to Dr Cardwell, was probably made concurrently with the original Articles, and under the same direction. Synod. I. 18. 2 In the 'Reformatio Legum,' where many of the Articles reappear in a somewhat different form, attention is distinctly confined to the heresies then in course of propagation. 'Posset magna colluvies aliarum hæresum accumulari, sed hoc tempore illas nominare solum voluimus, quæ potissimum hisce nostris temporibus per ecclesiam diffunduntur.' 22: ed. Oxon. 1850. 3 This phrase in the Articles of 1562 was exchanged for 'the Romish doctrine;' the council of Trent having in the mean while spoken out distinctly and adopt ed as portions of the Christian faith many of the opinions, which had been long floating in the Church, and advocated in the schools. The council had commenced its sittings in Dec. 1545: they continued till 1549: after an interruption of two years they were resumed; but before the business of the synod was completed a very long suspension intervened, and did not expire till Jan. 18, 1562. The 'actions' were then reopened, and finally confirmed by a papal bull bearing date Jan. 6, 1564. In several letters of the reformers we may observe the interest with which they were watching the contemporary disputations at Trent: e.g. Cranmer's Works, I. 346, 349. Evidence from the his times. But although we are not able to state from intertory of the nal evidence what were the heresies proscribed in the rest of the XLII. Articles, we have reason for expecting to meet with them in the contemporaneous history of the Church'. As in the case of the Augsburg Confession, from which those Articles have copied largely, they had an eye in the first instance to the existing necessities of the times, and were designed both as a protest against the scholastic corruptions, and as a curb on the licentiousness of private speculation, which the removal of the ancient yoke had too frequently occasioned. To borrow the strong but accurate language of a distinguished writer2 on this period, the papal infallibility was sometimes transferred to the leader of a petty sect: at other times a dreaming enthusiast would become his own pope, and would consult nothing but the oracle within his own breast.' It was indeed a stirring crisis in the life of Western Europe, when the human soul, starting up from its long torpor and finding itself free, rushed headlong into the wildest misbelief or the darkest moral corruption; when the cold-hearted rationalist and the visionary mystic, presuming on their individual powers, overleapt all the boundaries of thought which had been imposed by the sacred Scriptures, and threatened to sweep away in their avenging blindness not only the medieval errors, among which they had been nurtured, but also the purer exhibition of the Gospel revived by the Anglican Reformers. The rise of the Anabaptists. The origin of these varied misbelievers may be 1 This was certainly the view of Cranmer when he requested the continental reformers to take part in such a compilation: and Calvin understood him in this sense, as we read in a letter which he addressed to the Archbishop, while the English Articles were in progress. He there says that the doctors were invited, ut ex diversis ecclesiis, quæ puram Evangelii doctrinam amplexi sunt, convenirent precipui quique doctores, ac ex puro Dei verbo certam de singulis capitibus hodie controversis ac delucidam ad posteros confessionem ederent.' Cranmer's Works, I. 347. Cf. Ridley's language, in Strype's Annals, 1.260; ed. 1725. 2 Le Bas, Cranmer, II. 88. traced, in nearly all cases, to the scene1 of the earlier collisions between the 'old' and the new learning.' Their first and fundamental error was the rejection of infant baptism; and to this peculiarity of their system they owe the name of 'Anabaptists.' Mistaking the language of Luther2, as to the universal necessity of faith in the recipient of the holy sacraments, they postponed their administration of the initiatory rite until the subjects of it were (as they thought) actively exercising the pre-requisite conditions. But their divergencies from the doctrine of the reformers were not confined to this single point. They proceeded to Their numeassail the Lutheran tenet of justification by faith only, and in this way fell into the further question respecting the two natures of our blessed Lord. Hans Denk3, and others, affirmed that man may earn salvation by his own virtuous actions, and regarded the Founder of Christianity chiefly in His character of a Teacher. In Him, as one of the purest of our race, God was peculiarly manifested to the world, but to assert that He was our Saviour, in the received meaning of the term, was, in their view, to convert Him into an idol. While these impious opinions were spreading on all sides, a second school of Anabaptists' had been devising a very different creed3. They drew some 1 'It is a matter of the first importance that the Word of God should be preached here in German, to guard against the heresies which are introduced by our countrymen.' Micronius to Bullinger, in a letter dated London, May 20, 1550: 'Original Letters,' ed. P. S. 560. 2 This connexion was manifest in the case of Storch, who had been a disciple of Luther. His inference was, however, vehemently confuted in the Catechismus Major, Pars Iv. § 21, seqq., and elsewhere in the works of the Saxon reformers, who 3 Ranke, II. 559. 5 John Gastius 'De Anabap- rous heresies. false and dualistic distinction between the 'spirit' and the flesh,' and instead of holding, like the former sect, that we may be saved by our own efforts, alleged that the flesh only participated in the fall, and that when, by impurity of living, it was most of all obnoxious to the indignation of God, the spirit was still free and uncontaminated by the vilest of the outward actions. They attributed the restoration of harmony between these two elements of our nature to the intervention of the Logos, but maintained that His humanity was altogether peculiar, deriving nothing from the substance of the Virgin. Not a few heightened the impiety of their creed, by abandoning the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and joining the Arian and Socinian schools, which were then rising in Switzerland, Italy, and Poland. In addition to these extreme errors, some of the foreign Anabaptists inculcated the dogma of an absolute necessity; others preached the restoration of all things, and the final conversion of the devil; others maintained that the soul will sleep during the interval which elapses between death and judgment; while the majority of them were cherishing the belief that a millennial kingdom would be speedily established, and would subsist without any external magistracy, or without the guidance of the Written Word. In connexion with this hope, they asserted the strictest community of goods; they refused all military service of a merely secular kind, and objected to the taking of an oath in negociations with the world. around them; some also held the observance of the Lord's-day to be plainly anti-christian; others advocated polygamy, and affirmed even that to those who had received the Spirit, or the Anabaptist rite of initiation, adultery was no sin. All, however, were agreed in rejecting the authority both of the civil and ecclesiastical powers, denouncing the latter as an intolerable burden, and proclaiming the right of every Christian to circulate his creed, unrestrained by human legislation, or by the discipline of the Church. If we add to this sketch of continental Anabaptism' another of its prominent features, we shall understand how formidable it must have looked in the eyes of the English reformers. It was a first principle of the sect that all who were duly initiated were not only able, but bound to execute the office of a teacher, as soon as they perceived within them the motions of the Holy Spirit. The effect of this immediate inspiration made them at once independent of the Sacred Volume, which they ventured to characterize as a mere dead letter,' obsolete in itself, and in the course of its transmission so falsified by man as to be unworthy of the faith of Christians. In this way the last outward check on the presumptuous speculations of the individual mind was summarily demolished, and the entire system of Christianity abandoned to the fluctuations of the fevered fancy2. progress of tism' in En The precise date when the Anabaptist teachers The rise and found their way into England has not been handed Anabap down by the chroniclers of the period. As the sect gland. had no single leader and no peculiar locality, its movements were desultory and obscure, and, at first, somewhat difficult to follow. In the year 1538, however, its appearance in the country was enough to attract the attention of the government, and to call out the royal commission adverted to above3. A 1 These and other errors may be seen at large in Zwingli's 'Elenchus contra Catabaptistas ;' Melancthon's 'Propositions against the Doctrine of the Anabaptists' (German), in Luther's Schriften, xx. 2089 seqq. ed. 1745, where other evidence is given (2072-2229); Bullinger's work 'Adversus omnia Catabaptistarum prava Dogmata,' ed. Tiguri, 1535. See also Ranke, ubi sup. and Möhler's Symbolik, II. 155-188. 2 Möhler, Symbolik, II. 173. 3 See above, p. 41. For other traces of them at this period, see 'Institution of a Christian Man,' 93, 94; Wilkins, III. 843, 847. By 32 Hen. VIII. c. 49. § 11, all who held the following tenets were excluded from the pardon which had been granted by the King, in July, 1540: 'That infants ought not to be baptised, and if they be baptised they ought to be re-baptised when they com to laufull age: That it is not leafull for a Christen man to beare office or rule in |