Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/207

1545.] battled ineffectually to maintain the last fragment of their independent grandeur.

Tremendous as the outward overthrow must have seemed to those who remembered the old days, the inward changes were yet more momentous. A superstition which was but the counterpart of magic and witchcraft, which buried the Father of heaven and earth in the coffins of the saints, and trusted the salvation of the soul to the efficacy of mumbled words, had given place to a real, though indistinct, religion. Copies of the Bible were spread over the country in tens of thousands. Every English child was taught in its own tongue the Lord's Prayer, and the Creed, and the Commandments. Idolatry existed no longer; and the remaining difficulties lay only in the interpretation of the Sacred Text, and in the clinging sense, which adhered to all sides alike, that to misunderstand it was not an error, but a crime. Here, although Catholic doctrine, not only in its practical corruptions, but in its purest 'developments,' shook at the contact with the Gospels, yet the most thoughtful had been compelled to pause embarrassed. If mistake was fatal, and if the Divine nature and the Divine economy could not be subject to change, to reject the interpretations on which that doctrine had maintained itself, was to condemn the Christian Church to have been deserted for a thousand years by the spirit of truth, and this was a conclusion too frightful, too incredible to be endured. The laity, so bold against the Pope and the monasteries, turned their faces from it into the dogmatism of the Six Articles.