ing firmness, crying out, "This hand hath offended! this hand hath offended!"

It was soon over. The flames rose intensely around him, and a thick smoke enveloped him; so that life must have been speedily extinct.

Thus perished Thomas Cranmer, in the 67th year of his age, and after he had presided over the English Church twenty years. The view which we take of his character has been indicated in the course of the narrative, and requires no separate exhibition.

"Of all the martyrdoms during this great persecution," remarks Southey, "this was in all its circumstances the most injurious to the Roman cause. It was a manifestation of inveterate and deadly malice toward one who had borne his honours with almost unexampled meekness. It sufficiently disproved the argument on which the Romanists rested, that the constancy of our martyrs arose not from confidence in their faith, and the strength which they derived therefrom; but from vainglory, the pride of consistency, and the shame of retracting what they had so long professed. Such deceitful reasoning could have no place here: Cranmer had retracted, and the sincerity of his contrition for that sin was too plain to be denied, too public to be concealed, too memorable ever to be forgotten. The agony of his repentance had been seen by thousands; and tens of thousands had witnessed how, when that agony was past, he stood calm and immoveable amid the flames, a patient and willing holocaust; triumphant, not over his persecutors alone, but over himself, over the mind as well as the body, over fear, and weakness, and death.”

HUGH LATIMER was born at Thurcaston in Leicestershire, about the year 1484.* In one of his sermons before King Edward, he says himself,-"My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year, at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled as much as kept half a dozen men. He had a walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and he did find the king a harness, with himself and his horse, while he came to the place that he should receive the king's wages. I can remember that I buckled his har

*The year of his birth is not known. Some place it in 1470, which must be too early; others in 1491, which must be far too late. The date of 1484 has been chosen, after carefully balancing all the evidence. If 1491 were taken, he could not in 1497 have been old enough to buckle his father's harness, nor of such advanced years at his death, as all accounts agree in stating; and if 1470, he would have been older than incidental statements allow.

ness when he went into Blackheath field.* He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to preach before the king's majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty nobles a-piece; so that he brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor. And all this he did of the said farm, where he that now hath it payeth sixteen pounds by the year, or more; and is not able to do anything for his prince, for himself, or for his children, or to give a cup of drink to the poor."

This honest yeoman finding that his son Hugh gave promise of a ready wit, was tempted to make a scholar of him; and after having previously given him the best education that the common schools of the neighbourhood afforded, sent him at the age of fourteen to Christ's College, Cambridge. He was chosen fellow of Clare Hall in 1509 while yet an under-graduate. In the following year he proceeded to the degree of Bachelor of Arts, and in 1514 commenced Master of Arts. He states himself that about the age of thirty he proceeded to the degree of Bachelor in Divinity; but it does not appear that he ever took the degree of Doctor in that faculty; and indeed he is never called Doctor, but is always, even when a bishop, styled "Master Hugh Latimer." After completing his degrees he was admitted to the order of the priesthood by the Bishop of Lincoln.

At the university Latimer was distinguished for his "sanctimony of life," as well as for his studious habits. He was besides a most fervent and zealous Romanist, and a bitter opposer of all who favoured the Reformation. He had at one time serious thoughts of taking the cowl, under the impression that he should never go to hell if he once became a friar; and such was the respect in which he was held that he was appointed to the charge of keeping the University Cross, in token of preference for his extraordinary sanctity. It seems

*Where the Cornish rebels were defeated in 1497.

he was so shocked at the impiety of the " new learning" that he actually feared the end of the world to be at hand. On proceeding Bachelor of Divinity, his whole oration was levelled against Philip Melanchthon and the opinions entertained by that eminent person: and it is related that he used sometimes to go to the divinityschool to oppose George Stafford, the divinity lecturer, who had embraced the views of the Reformers, and to dissuade the students from attending his instructions.

It was soon after he took his bachelor's degree in divinity that a change came over his views. The zeal which he on that and other occasions manifested, attracted the attention of Thomas Bilney, then at Cambridge, who conceived an ardent desire to enlist that zeal in the cause to which it was now opposed. His hope that this might be possible, arose from perceiving that the rage which he now manifested against the Reformation, was founded more on an intimacy with the scholastic divinity than on a knowledge of the Scriptures. The method Bilney adopted of making an impression upon Latimer was this; he came to his study, and asked him to hear him make his confession. He readily assented; and Bilney proceeding with his confession, he was so touched, that inquiry was awakened, and, under the instructions of Bilney, he was led to forsake his former modes of study and devote himself more entirely to the Scriptures. Many years after Latimer said to Ridley," By travailing thus with me, you use me as Bilney did once, when he converted me,-pretending as though he would be taught of me, he found ways and means to teach me; and so do you.'

Latimer was all his life incapable of doing anything by halves. The simple earnestness of his character rendered any temporising medium impossible to him. Under his

altered views, he became as zealous in behalf of the new learning as he had lately been against it. One of his first acts was to seek out Stafford and implore his forgiveness for the outrages against him of which he had formerly been guilty. His hostilities against the ancient abuses were now carried on with the most incessant

activity, and in a manner that could not fail to attract the public attention. He employed himself in visiting the sick and the prisoners in the town of Cambridge. He preached frequently, both in English and ad clerum. The account given of his sermons in the university by Becon, who heard them, is, that none, except the stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart, "ever went away from his preaching without being affected with a strong detestation of sin, and moved unto all godliness and virtue." Many also who had been strongly prejudiced against him, on being persuaded by their friends to go and hear him preach, returned from his sermons with all their prejudices softened. In his Sermon on the Card, by a sord of homely ingenuity, he made even the practice of card-playing subservient to religious instruction. In this sermon, preached the Sunday before Christmas 1529, he dealt out to the audience cards from the 5th, 6th, and 7th chapters of Matthew, accompanying them with an application to the superstitious practices of the time. "This blunt preaching," Fuller well remarks, was in those dark days admirably effectual, which would justly be ridiculous in our age;" and he gives an instance of a preacher in his day who produced nothing but amusement in his audience by "a fond imitation of Latimer's Card sermon.

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This sermon gave great offence to the Papal party; and one Dr. Buchneham (Buckingham), prior of the Black Friars, undertook to preach a counter-sermon, in which he, by a still more quaint device, exhibited dice before his audience, in order to illustrate the inexpe diency of permitting to the people the use of the Scrip ture in English-making express reference to certain passages in which there was great danger of gross misapplication of the sacred text, if subjected to be read by men of simple understandings in their own language. Latimer, who thought himself bound to answer this sermon, came soon after to the church, and before a large audience, composed both of University men and towns-people, refuted the arguments of the prior, who was himself present, sitting directly before the preacher,