nes,
And far beneath the earth and ocean spread,
Round _him_ are icy rocks, and loudly blow.
Contending tempests on his naked head."

On the disappearance of Cromwell from the stage, Cranmer came forward
more prominently. He was a learned doctor in that university which has
ever sent forth the apostles of great emancipating movements. He was
born in 1489, and was therefore twenty years of age on the accession of
Henry VIII. in 1509, and was twenty-eight when Luther published his
theses. He early sympathized with the reform doctrines, but was too
politic to take an active part in their discussion. He was a moderate,
calm, scholarly man, not a great genius or great preacher. He had none
of those bold and dazzling qualities which attract the gaze of the
world. We behold in him no fearless and impetuous Luther,--attacking
with passionate earnestness the corruptions of Rome; bracing himself up
to revolutionary assaults, undaunted before kings and councils, and
giving no rest to his hands or slumber to his eyes until he had
consummated his protests,--a man of the people, yet a dictator to
princes. We see no severely logical Calvin,--pushing out his
metaphysical deductions until he had chained the intellect of his party
to a system of incomparable grandeur and yet of repulsive austerity,
exacting all the while the same allegiance to doctrines which he deduced
from the writings of Paul as he did to the direct declarations of
Christ; next to Thomas Aquinas, the acutest logician the Church has
known; a system-maker, like the great Dominican schoolmen, and their
common master and oracle, Saint Augustine of Hippo. We see in Cranmer no
uncompromising and aggressive reformer like Knox,--controlling by a
stern dogmatism both a turbulent nobility and an uneducated people, and
filling all classes alike with inextinguishable hatred of everything
that even reminded them of Rome. Nor do we find in Cranmer the outspoken
and hearty eloquence of Latimer,--appealing to the people at St. Paul's
Cross to shake off all the trappings of the "Scarlet Mother," who had so
long bewitched the world with her sorceries.

Cranmer, if less eloquent, less fearless, less logical, less able than
these, was probably broader, more comprehensive in his views,--adapting
his reforms to the circumstances of the age and country, and to the
genius of the English mind. Hence his reforms, if less brilliant, were
more permanent. He framed the creed t