BY those who defended the doctrine of transubstantiation it was spoken of as a matter to be deplored that men’s understandings should be so weak that they could not comprehend divine mysteries. Thus a preacher of the time complains that, whereas Christ had promised to be with His own, even to the end of the world, those who were so daring as to deny that He was actually present in the sacrament of the altar made His word of none effect by their unbelief. Men who professed to find difficulty in believing as the church taught upon this matter were only those, he said, who, “though they have naught but ‘faith,’ ‘faith’ ever in their mouths, reject the doctrine which holy church teacheth because they cannot comprehend it by their reason, without which they will believe nothing.”
Meanwhile many questions were publicly discussed. “Let us understand,” said some, “what the mass really means. Is it true, as the Church teaches, that the receiving the consecrated bread from the priest by one man can benefit another who is not even present? Is it, indeed, true that by the saying of thirty masses a year a soul can be delivered from purgatory, and brought, past the iron bars of that prison-house, within the paradise of God?”
These and kindred subjects were handled at a public disputation, or, as we should now say, conference, held at Oxford in 1554, when the reformers boldly maintained that the doctrine of transubstantiation could not be proved “by the plain and manifest worth of Scripture,” and that in the Lord’s Supper “there is none other oblation and sacrifice than a remembrance of Christ’s death, and thanksgiving.” Cranmer and Ridley both spoke at the conference, the latter specially arguing that the Christ, concerning whom they were asked to believe that He was present in the sacrament of the altar, was ever then sitting at God’s right hand, alive for evermore.
Then Latimer was brought forward―that old man, now past eighty, whom the people had so long been used to see as he went from village to village, dressed in his threadbare coat of rough frieze, his spectacles and his New Testament hanging from his girdle preaching wherever he went―often, we are told, using a hollow tree as his pulpit.
He found himself now in a very different scene. Looking round upon the assembly of learned men, he said that he had not used Latin much these twenty years, and could not dispute with them, yet would he declare his faith. Then he spoke with his old fiery eloquence against the doctrine of the “real presence” as the root of all errors; he blamed in no measured terms, those who had changed the Lord’s Supper into a mass, had taken the cup from the people, saying that the priests alone might partake of it, and, “instead of service in a known tongue, were bringing the nation to a worship which they did not understand.”
He could not argue with them, he said for his memory was gone, but this he could say: his faith was founded upon the word of God.
As the conference of the preceding year had been abruptly ended by the learned doctor who presided exclaiming—when one of the reformers had appealed to the authority of scripture, ― “You have the word, but we have the sword,” so now this disputation closed by Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer being declared to be heretics, and no longer members of the church. We are told that Cranmer, naturally of a timid spirit, ready to shrink back at the approach of danger, spoke then in no faltering tone, though he must have seen the dark shadow already falling across his path.
“From this your judgment and sentence”, he said, “I appeal to the just judgment of Almighty God, trusting to be present with Him in heaven, for whose presence on the altar I am thus condemned.”
Ridley spoke next: “Although I be not of your company, yet I doubt not but my name is written in another place, whither this sentence will send us sooner than we should by the course of nature have come,”―for he was not an old man, and could not say as Latimer did: “I thank God most heartily that He hath prolonged my life to this end, that I may in this case glorify God with this kind of death.”
And so, with words of triumph on their lips, these men, “out of weakness made strong,” were led from the council, leaving their accusers to fall back upon that “power of the sword,” of which they had boasted that it belonged to them.
It was not till the autumn of the next year that the end came for Ridley and Latimer at Oxford. For Cranmer it would have been easier if he might have passed straight from that council chamber to his fiery trial; the waiting time was for him a long agony of suffering and terror; many a time his feet had well-nigh slipped, and he gave much occasion to the enemies of the truth to triumph, before he, too, was strengthened to give up his life for the faith which he had all but denied through weakness and fear.
It was during this interval that changes had taken place in the laws of England by which the terrible three years of persecution which followed were to be rendered possible. Another Parliament had been called and dissolved, yet the two laws of which we have read, the Act of “Six Articles,” and that “About the burning of a heretic,” had not been revived; while this was the case, there was still respite, but Mary’s third Parliament consented to her will in two very important matters. These persecuting Acts became once more law, and Cardinal Pole, the queen’s cousin, was recalled from his long exile. He was a favorite with the people, and we may remember that they had petitioned for his return during the former reign. He now came back as the Pope’s legate, with full power to absolve the Parliament, in his name, from the sin of heresy, and to reconcile the erring nation, setting it right with the Church of Rome, which represented itself as then, as ever, ready to receive the wanderers back to the fold. The Pope could not have found a more trusty messenger. Full of zeal and earnestness, he came to England like the leader of a forlorn hope. The country, he well knew, was fast drifting away from her anchorage in the sure haven provided by the true church for every faithful soul. It was his mission to hold her back from destruction. The moment had come; if it were allowed to pass all would be lost. He inspired the queen with the same hope, and was, until the end of his life―he lived only one day after her―Mary’s most trusted councilor and friend; and it is believed by some historians that if any one man could be counted directly responsible for the terrible scenes which made her reign, during the last three years of it, a reign of terror, and which have left so red a stain upon her name, that man was Reginald Pole. At the time, the people were inclined to lay the blame of all the dark doings of that terrible hour at the door of the queen’s Spanish husband, and they believed that Gardiner and the hated Bonner were but his tools. Now, however, we can have no doubt that it was Pole who urged upon the bishops their duty to God, and to the souls of those who were being led captive by the devil under their very eyes, and especially enjoined upon them the necessity of looking well to see that none among the clergy might be leading the people astray, urging them to search diligently, and separate the false shepherds from the true.
A special court, over which Gardiner presided, was summoned to try those who were suspected of heresy, and one of the first of the offending clergy who was brought before it was John Rogers, the same who had had so much to do with translating that version of the Scriptures called “Matthew’s Bible.”
He had been obliged to leave England when the Act of Six Articles was first passed, for one of the articles forbade the marriage of priests, and Rogers had married some time before. He went to Germany, where he lived until the death of Henry, and the great changes it brought with it, made it safe for him to return. Ridley, then Bishop of London, had appointed him to preach at St. Paul’s, and in a sermon preached there soon after Mary’s accession he had spoken some strong words, exhorting his hearers to continue steadfastly to hold to the faith of Christ’s gospel, come what might. This sermon brought him into notice; he was ordered to remain in his own house, and soon afterward sent to prison. In the autumn of the next year, after the “reconciling” of England to the Pope by Cardinal Pole, measures were taken for punishing those already in prison; and Rogers, with Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, Sandars, a clergyman of Coventry, arrested for preaching contrary to Gardiner’s prohibition, and Rowland Taylor, rector of Hadleigh, an old man, who had vainly endeavored to prevent mass being said in his church, were brought before bishops Gardiner, Bonner, and Tunstall to be examined concerning their belief on the matter of the sacrament. It is true that one of the charges made against Rogers was that he, being a priest, had married contrary to law eighteen years before, but the chief accusation brought against all the prisoners was that they had denied the doctrine of the “real presence”―they did not believe in transubstantiation, and it was upon this count that they were all condemned to suffer as heretics.