Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 3.djvu/198

178 years ceased to exist, developing gradually from the type of Wittenberg to that of Geneva.

Lastly, and still confounded in a common mass of abomination, lay Zuinglians, Anabaptists, sacramentarians, outcasts disowned and cursed by all the rest as a stigma and reproach; those whose hearts were in the matter, who supplied the heat which had melted the crust of habit, and had made the Reformation possible.

For the present the struggle in the State lay between the Anglicans and the Lutherans—the King and Cromwell lying again between them. Cromwell, on the whole orthodox in matters of speculation, cared, nevertheless, little for such matters; his true creed was a hatred of charlatans, and of the system which nursed and gave them power; and his sympathy was gradually bursting the bounds of a tradition which continued to hamper him. The King was constant to his place of mediator; he insisted on the sacraments, yet he abhorred the magical aspect of them. He differed from the Anglicans in his zeal for the dissemination of the Bible, in his detestation of the frauds, impostures, profligacies, idlenesses, ignorances, which had disgraced equally the secular and regular clergy, and in his fixed English resolution never more to tolerate the authority of the Pope. He differed from the Lutherans, and thus more and more from Cromwell, in his dislike of theoretic novelties, in an inability to clear himself from attaching a special character to the priesthood, in an adherence generally to the historical faith, and an anxiety to save himself and the country from the reproach of apostasy. A sharp