Beacon Lights of History, Volume 06 eBook

John Lord
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 352 pages of information about Beacon Lights of History, Volume 06.

Beacon Lights of History, Volume 06 eBook

John Lord
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 352 pages of information about Beacon Lights of History, Volume 06.

On the disappearance of Cromwell from the stage, Cranmer came forward more prominently.  He was a learned doctor in that university which has ever sent forth the apostles of great emancipating movements.  He was born in 1489, and was therefore twenty years of age on the accession of Henry VIII. in 1509, and was twenty-eight when Luther published his theses.  He early sympathized with the reform doctrines, but was too politic to take an active part in their discussion.  He was a moderate, calm, scholarly man, not a great genius or great preacher.  He had none of those bold and dazzling qualities which attract the gaze of the world.  We behold in him no fearless and impetuous Luther,—­attacking with passionate earnestness the corruptions of Rome; bracing himself up to revolutionary assaults, undaunted before kings and councils, and giving no rest to his hands or slumber to his eyes until he had consummated his protests,—­a man of the people, yet a dictator to princes.  We see no severely logical Calvin,—­pushing out his metaphysical deductions until he had chained the intellect of his party to a system of incomparable grandeur and yet of repulsive austerity, exacting all the while the same allegiance to doctrines which he deduced from the writings of Paul as he did to the direct declarations of Christ; next to Thomas Aquinas, the acutest logician the Church has known; a system-maker, like the great Dominican schoolmen, and their common master and oracle, Saint Augustine of Hippo.  We see in Cranmer no uncompromising and aggressive reformer like Knox,—­controlling by a stern dogmatism both a turbulent nobility and an uneducated people, and filling all classes alike with inextinguishable hatred of everything that even reminded them of Rome.  Nor do we find in Cranmer the outspoken and hearty eloquence of Latimer,—­appealing to the people at St. Paul’s Cross to shake off all the trappings of the “Scarlet Mother,” who had so long bewitched the world with her sorceries.

Cranmer, if less eloquent, less fearless, less logical, less able than these, was probably broader, more comprehensive in his views,—­adapting his reforms to the circumstances of the age and country, and to the genius of the English mind.  Hence his reforms, if less brilliant, were more permanent.  He framed the creed that finally was known as the Thirty-nine Articles, and was the true founder of the English Church, as that Church has existed for more than three centuries,—­neither Roman nor Puritan, but “half-way between Rome and Geneva;” a compromise, and yet a Church of great vitality, and endeared to the hearts of the English people.  Northern Germany—­the scene of the stupendous triumphs of Luther—­is and has been, since the time of Frederick the Great, the hot-bed of rationalistic inquiries; and the Genevan as well as the French and Swiss churches which Calvin controlled have become cold, with a dreary and formal Protestantism, without poetry or life.  But the Church of England has survived two revolutions and

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Beacon Lights of History, Volume 06 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.