Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/197

1539.] in the speculative system of the faith, content to separate from Rome, but only that they might bear Italian fruit more profusely and luxuriantly when rooted in their own soil. Of these the avowed leaders were the majority of the bishops and the peers of the old creation, agreeing for the present to make the experiment of independence, but with a secret dislike to change, and a readiness, should occasion require, to return to the central communion. Weak in their reasoning, and selfish in their objects, the Anglicans were of importance only from the support of the conservative English instinct, which then as ever preferred the authority of precedent to any other guide, and defended established opinions and established institutions because they had received them from their fathers, and because their understandings were slow in entertaining new convictions.

To the third or Lutheran party belonged Cramner, Latimer, Barnes, Shaxton, Crome, Hilsey, Jerome, Barlow, all the Government Reformers of position and authority, adhering to the real presence, and, in a general sense, to the sacraments, but melting them away in the interpretation. The true creed of these men was spiritual, not mechanical. They abhorred idolatry, images, pilgrimages, ceremonies, with a Puritan fervour. They followed Luther in the belief in justification by faith, they rejected masses, they did not receive the sacerdotal system, they doubted purgatory, they desired that the clergy should be allowed to marry, they differed from the Protestants in the single but vital doctrine of transubstantiation. This party after a few