remained sacred to the bulk of Englishmen, was attacked with a scurrility
and profaneness which passes belief. The doctrine of Transubstantiation,
which was as yet recognized by law, was held up to scorn in ballads and
mystery plays. In one church a Protestant lawyer raised a dog in his hands
when the priest elevated the Host. The most sacred words of the old
worship, the words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into
a nickname for jugglery as "Hocus-pocus."

[Sidenote: The Six Articles]

It was by this attack on the Mass, even more than by the other outrages,
that the temper both of Henry and the nation was stirred to a deep
resentment. With the Protestants Henry had no sympathy whatever. He was a
man of the New Learning; he was proud of his orthodoxy and of his title of
Defender of the Faith. And above all he shared to the utmost his people's
love of order, their clinging to the past, their hatred of extravagance
and excess. The first sign of reaction was seen in the Parliament of 1539.
Never had the Houses shown so little care for political liberty. The
Monarchy seemed to free itself from all parliamentary restrictions
whatever when a formal statute gave the king's proclamations the force of
parliamentary laws. Nor did the Church find favour with them. No word of
the old opposition was heard when a bill was introduced granting to the
king the greater monasteries which had been saved in 1536. More than six
hundred religious houses fell at a blow, and so great was the spoil that
the king promised never again to call on his people for subsidies. But the
Houses were equally at one in withstanding the new innovations in
religion, and an act for "abolishing diversity of opinions in certain
articles concerning Christian religion" passed with general assent. On the
doctrine of Transubstantiation, which was reasserted by the first of six
Articles to which the Act owes its usual name, there was no difference of
feeling or belief between the men of the New Learning and the older
Catholics. But the road to a further instalment of even moderate reform
seemed closed by the five other articles which sanctioned communion in one
kind, the celibacy of the clergy, monastic vows, private masses, and
auricular confession. A more terrible feature of the reaction was the
revival of persecution. Burning was denounced as the penalty for a denial
of transubstantiation; on a second offence it became the penalty for an
infract