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 all the changes of human thought, and is still a mighty power, decorous, beautiful, conservative, yet open to all the liberalizing influences of an age of science and philosophy.  Cranmer, though a scholastic, seems to have perceived that nothing is more misleading and uncertain and unsatisfactory than any truth pushed out to its severest logical conclusions without reference to other truths which have for their support the same divine authority.  It is not logic which has built up the most enduring institutions, but common-sense and plain truths, and appeals to human consciousness,—­the cogito, ergo sum, without whose approval most systems have perished.  In mediis tutissimus ibis, is not indeed an agreeable maxim to zealots and partisans and dialectical logicians, but it seems to be induced from the varied experiences of human life and the history of different ages and nations, and applies to all the mixed sciences, like government and political economy, as well as to church institutions.

As Cromwell made his fortune by advising the King to assume the headship of the Church in England, so Cranmer’s rise is to be traced to his advice to Henry to appeal to the decision of universities whether or not he could be legally divorced from Catharine, since the Pope—­true to the traditions, of the Catholic Church, or from fear of Charles V.—­would not grant a dispensation.  All this business was a miserable quibble, a tissue of scholastic technicalities.  But it answered the ends of Cranmer.  The schools