and that all processes relating to matters not purely spiritual should be carried on in the name of the king; an enactment which took away all controlling power from the ecclesiastical courts themselves, and compelled them to punish any neglect of their orders by excommunication; so that this sacred and awful process is frequently degraded by being used without any adequate reason, and in cases where there may be no moral offence. The nomination of the bishops virtually made little difference, as to ecclesiastical appointments, but with respect to the other part of the bill, either too little or too much was done. No causes, not purely spiritual, should have been left to the cognisance of these courts, unless some temporal power had at the same time been conceded to them; and this mistake has created an odium against these tribunals, which the church cannot remedy, and which originates in the heterogeneous nature of their composition. The lands belonging to chantries were now given to the crown, much against the wishes of Cranmer, who hoped by continuing them till the king became of age, to have preserved a large fund for the future benefit of the poorer clergy. In the first draft of this bill the words ran, “ chantries, hospitals, fraternities, and “ colleges;” and as these expressions might have been so interpreted as to take in the universities, much exertion was made by those who understood the value of establishments for education, and a clause

* Strype's Life of Smith, p. 29. Cheke.

lief in transubstantiation, that they approved of masses satisfactory, and of praying for the dead, and that many of them objected to the use of the vulgar tongue for the whole of the ceremony, though they consented to the reading and explaining the gospel in English

§. 309. The Communion Service, which was published on March the 8th *, does not essentially differ from the one now in use, and in its composition Cranmer appears to have made no unnecessary alterations, but to have retained whatever was innocent in the service of the mass : the work itself indeed appears to be an intermediate step between the old and the new offices; for such parts of it only were in English, as more particularly related to the general communicant; while the rest, even the consecration of the elements, was not translated.

In the Exhortation, read the day before the celebration of the communion t, the people are allowed to use or to abstain from auricular confession, and warned against entertaining uncharitable opinions with regard to those who differed from themselves in this particular. The evils and abuses arising from this custom had so alienated the minds of most men from it, that it was readily dispensed with ; but it has proved a misfortune to our church, that the tide of opinion has carried us too far towards the opposite extreme. The scriptures never speak of confession as obligatory in such a sense, as the injunctions of the church of Rome had ordained. Sparrow's Coll. p. 13.

+ Ibid. p. 18.