and volumes of defence and attack have come from both sides. My justification in inviting you to consider again some of these debated questions, is the fact that only in our own generation has it become possible to arrive at a more just judgment. The history of the English Reformation will continue to be studied for all time. Its tragedies were so great and its effect upon the religious life of the English-speaking people has been so permanent, that it can never lose its absorbing interest. But until a few years ago the writers dealt largely in invective. From the point of view of many writers it was a glorious series of events by which the power of Rome was finally crushed in England after some five hundred years of struggle, and on the side of Rome it was the foundation of a Church born of lust and passion. The events are so distant, that the time has surely come when we can more dispassionately examine what was done and why men acted as they did. For the reign of Henry VIII, at least from 1509 to 1530, we are indebted to the original documents edited some years ago by Dr. Brewer for the Master of the Rolls. The Prefaces to the four volumes of Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII have been published in two large volumes, and no one can write of this reign without a careful examination of these works based upon the original documents. Permission was given to Dr. Brewer to examine and classify the Rolls Series of letters and official documents. He examined also the MSS. in the British Museum and those in Lambeth Library, as well as the treasures in the college libraries at Oxford and Cambridge. Before this work was undertaken everything was in confusion, but now a Calendar of Public Records and State Papers has been formed and students know where to go for information at first hand.

The Lords of the Treasury gave their sanction to the publication of Dr. Brewer's Prefaces on the condition it should be stated that "the Prefaces have no official character or authority, and that their republication is permitted at the urgent request of the friends of

Professor Brewer, on account of their literary interest." Dr. Brewer disclaims the credit of having written a history of the reign of Henry VIII. "It is not my business to write history," he says, "but to show the bearings of these new materials upon history."

No one doubts his literary skill and fine mental equipment. Whilst he had handled the musty documents which had lain in confusion for centuries he is no dull antiquary, but he clothes his conclusions in fascinating language and with a judgment which is the result of a desire to tell the truth. These are the characteristics of his great work, which renders impossible in the future the wild partisan statements upon which men's minds have been fed on both sides.

These Prefaces carry us only to the fall of Wolsey in 1530, but the investigations of recent years supply us with ample material for the rest of our period, and we will as far as possible keep to original documents or authority which is first hand.

In asking you to listen to these brief biographies, I must invite you to lay aside in some cases the convictions of a lifetime, or at all events to hear patiently the stories of those distant days. We have to transplant our thoughts into generations when tolerance was unknown, and when men sought to enforce religious opinions by fire and the sword. The impartial investigator of the Reformation History must come to the conclusion that there is little to choose between the two sides. If Queen Mary went to her grave embittered by disappointment because the fires of Smithfield resulted only in an abiding hatred of Rome, the treatment of some of the great abbots by Henry VIII was brutal and vindictive. Queen Elizabeth, with consummate skill and by using the feminine arts of delay and coquetry, succeeded in undoing all the acts of her sister's reign, and gained with it the enthusiastic admiration of the nation. The foul Gunpowder Plot of 1605, repudiated by Rome but hatched by the Jesuits, sank deep into the resentment of the people.

To the lasting disgrace of Rome it must be recorded that she plotted against the lives of Elizabeth and James I, and all the parliamentary measures of those days were passed in view of these dangers. The Puritan rebellion was a most real danger, which if successful would have changed the whole status and character of the English Church. Not until the Stuarts had been tried and found wanting in the persons of James I and Charles I, and the nation had experienced the days of Oliver Cromwell, was the final settlement of 1662 reached.

It would be an easy task to repeat the thrice-told tales of these days, but I feel we ought now to raise other questions, and to ask ourselves not only what was the nature and result of the Reformation, but still more, what was its cause?

The divorce case in the reign of Henry VIII, which looms so large in the mental horizon of many, was at the best or worst no more than an incident around which the great movement centred for a while. It raised questions which had been asked in England many times during the previous generations, and what other kings had done feebly or not at all, the imperious, passionate and self-willed Henry VIII did once for all.

Let us inquire into some of these underlying principles which emerged into world-wide prominence at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The English Church before its Reformation.

Let us clearly understand that we are speaking of the Church of England, the Ecclesia Anglicana, the Church of the English-speaking people. It suits the purpose of Roman controversialists to maintain that the Catholic Church existed in England till the time of the Reformation, and was then replaced by a new Church cradled in passion and nurtured by robbery. Against this view every true-hearted English Churchman must contend with all his might, and in doing so he has the support of history. When the Catholic and

Apostolic Church was first established in England is one of the doubtful things of history, but the existence of such a Church in very early times, largely missionary in character, is by no means doubtful.1 British bishops attended the Council of Arles in 314.2

The evangelisation of the north of England from Holy Island had taken place before the advent of Augustine in 597, and all the holy memories of Iona and Lindisfarne, which lingered for so many centuries in the north, belong to us and not to Rome.

Theodore of Canterbury (668–690), though provided for us by the Bishop of Rome, became intensely national in his feelings, and when Wilfrid of York returned to England in 680, bringing with him the papal decision disannulling an administrative act of the Archbishop, the clergy and laity of Northumbria unanimously determined that the papal letters were an insult to the Crown and nation. Wilfrid was condemned to nine months' imprisonment, and the threatened excommunication of Theodore never came. This grand old man of the English Church came to his great administrative work at Canterbury at the age of sixty-six, and died at eightyeight, after harmonising the discordant elements in the different sections of the Church. He was great as an

1 Tertullian, Adv. Jud. vii. [c. A.D. 208]. Parthi [et cet., as in Acts ii. 9, 10], Gaetulorum varietates, et Maurorum multi fines, Hispaniarum omnes termini, et Galliarum diversae nationes, et Britannorum inaccessa Romanis loca, Christo vero subdita, in quibus omnibus locis Christi nomen Qui jam venit regnat, Origen, Homil. xxviii. in Matt. xxiv. [A.D. 246],

Quid autem dicamus de Britannis aut apud Barbaros, Dacos, et Sarmatas, et Scythas, quorum plurimi nondum audiverunt Evangelii verbum, audituri sunt autem in ipsa saeculi consummatione?

2 Their signatures are included amongst those of the Bishops of Gaul

Eborius Episcopus de civitate Eboracensi provincia Britannia. Restitutus Episcopus de civitate Londinensi provincia suprascripta.

Adelfius Episcopus de civitate Colonia Londinensium Exinde Sacerdos presbyter; Arminius diaconus.

(See Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents, Hadden & Stubbs, vol. i., p. 7.)

B

administrator and scholar, and whilst he did not, as some suppose, divide England into parishes, he divided the larger dioceses, formed many parishes with parish churches, enforced moral discipline and laid a broad foundation for a more learned clergy.

The Venerable Bede of Jarrow, who died in 735, says of those days: "Happier times than these never were since the English came into Britain; for their kings were brave men and good Christians, and while, by the terror of their arms, the barbarians were kept in check, the minds of men were bent upon the joys of the heavenly kingdom which had just been revealed to them; and every one who desired instruction in the sacred Scriptures had masters at hand to instruct him (Bede, iv. 2).

Theodore found the Church in England missionary and he left it national. The Saxon Chronicle, under the year 690, in noticing his death, remarks: "Before this the bishops had been Romans, from this time they were English."

The Norman Conquest brought new ideas into English life both in Church and State. William the Conqueror and the Norman kings were as Erastian in their claims to rule the Church as was Henry VIII. Anselm suffered a martyrdom of pain in his championship of the spiritual rights of the Church, and Thomas à Becket, whose shrine in Canterbury Cathedral became the centre of some of the most powerful religious influences until the time of the Reformation, was the murdered victim of kingly tyranny. It was reserved for King John in 1213 to sacrifice English liberty and to surrender the kingdoms of England and Ireland to the Pope and his successors, and to receive them back from him as his feudal vassal. England thus became a fief of the Papacy, paying annual tribute to the Bishop of Rome as feudal lord. This, of course, was the darkest day of England's humiliation, and once more the champion of national liberty was found in the Archbishop of Canterbury. Stephen Langton, who had been forced upon the King by the Pope, was the leader of the barons and clergy and commons in preparing