far weakened, that the majority could
witness its overthrow with patience if not with complacency.

To have timed this momentous step so fortunately for the cause of
prerogative might in some princes have been esteemed the result of
profound combinations,--the triumph of political sagacity; in Henry it
was the pure effect of accident: but the advantages which he derived
from the quiescent state of the public mind were not on this account the
less real or the less important, nor did he suffer them to go
unimproved. On one hand, no considerable opposition was made to his
assumption of the supremacy; on the other, the spoil of the monasteries
was not intercepted in its passage to the royal coffers by the more
rapid movements of a populace intoxicated with fanatical rage or fired
with hopes of plunder. What appeared still more extraordinary, he found
it practicable, to the end of his reign, to keep the nation suspended,
as to doctrine and the forms of worship, in that nice equilibrium
between protestant and papist which happened best to accord with his
individual views or prejudices.

Cranmer, who has a better title than any other to be revered as the
father of the Anglican church, showed himself during the life of Henry
the most cautious and complaisant of reformers. Aware that any rashness
or precipitation on the part of the favorers of new opinions might
expose them to all the fury of persecution from a prince so dogmatical
and violent, he constantly refrained from every alarming appeal to the
sense of the people on theological questions, and was content to proceed
in his great work step by step, with a slow, uncertain, and interrupted
progress, at the will of that capricious master whose vacillations of
humor or opinion he watched with the patience, and improved with the
skill, of a finished courtier.

Administered in so qualified and mitigated a form, the spirit of
reformation exhibited in this country little of its stronger and more
turbulent workings. No sect at that time arose purely and peculiarly
English: our native divines did not embrace exclusively, or with
vehemence, the tenets of any one of the great leaders of reform on the
continent, and a kind of eclectic system became that of the Anglican
church from its earliest institution.

The respective contributions to this system of the most celebrated
theologians of the age may be thus stated. It was chiefly from
Zwingle,--the first, in point of time, of all