Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/220

200 less alarming to the Bishop of Winchester's supporters, none the less encouraging to their opponents. The orthodox faction were still powerful. They had the law upon their side; the Duke of Norfolk stood by them, stoutly supported by Wriothesley, who was now chancellor, and the body of the peers. If they had failed in their late heresy bill, they had still the Six Articles to fall back upon; and as the King was as anxious as he had ever been to check the extravagances with whicn the Protestant preachers were outraging the prejudices of the people, they had the advantage of a defensive position, and they determined to use their power so long as it remained to them.

They had not long to wait for their opportunity. Many of the chantries had been suppressed under the late Act, and their disappearance, if left to its silent operation, would have carried its own lesson. Dr Crome, a loud advocate of the party of movement, with the appetite for inconvenient dilemmas which belongs so frequently to clever unwise men, preached a sermon at the Mercers' Chapel, in which he worked the statute into an argument against purgatory. Either, he said, the mass priests ought to have been maintained, and a wrong had been done to the souls of those who had left lands to support them, or the singing of masses by living men did not and could not affect the condition of those souls. The reasoning was unanswerable; but where a victory is to be gained over a deep-rooted prejudice, sensible men are contented with the acceptance of premises, and leave the conclusions to follow of