As one of the first acts of the reign, all the bishops were compelled to take out fresh Commissions from the Crown for the exercise of their episcopal offices. In this Cranmer set a willing example of obedience; and in the preamble of the new Letters Patent the royal power was set forth as the source of all jurisdiction, civil and ecclesiastical. Within a month of Edward's accession, the images of saints in the London churches were dishonoured and mutilated, and sermons were preached, without punishment or rebuke, against the observance of Lent and other Catholic practices. Other changes in the line of the Reformation followed quickly one upon another. Images, shrines and pictures of Our Lady and the Saints were ordered to be destroyed, and the Litany of the Saints, hitherto said in procession, was made into a prayer to be said kneeling. All this was a sufficient indication of the trend of mind in the men now in power towards the Reformation doctrines of Luther and the other continental heretics. For objecting to these changes some of the bishops were lodged in prison, and in the course of a general Visitation of churches in the diocese of London, whilst the Bishop was in prison, the images in St. Paul's and other city churches were pulled down and broken up; the painted pictures and frescoes upon the walls--"the books of the poor and unlearned" as they were called--were covered with whitewash, and in their place the Ten Commandments were written upon the plaster. The first Parliament of this reign met in November, 1547, and the important matter--from a religious standpoint--discussed and settled was the introduction of Communion under both kinds--or as some modern writers put it "the restoration of the cup to the laity." This change, significant as it was, might mean little more than the rejection of a disciplinary law of the Church, which had been introduced many ages before for wise and obvious reasons. But to those who will study the history of the controversies of the sixteenth century, the reintroduction of Communion under both kinds was an outward manifestation of the rejection of the Catholic Eucharistic doctrine, which taught that our Blessed Lord was present, whole and entire, Body, Soul and Divinity in each and every portion of the Most Holy Sacrament. And, as St. Thomas teaches in his dogmatic hymn of the Holy Eucharist, in every part and portion, "_integer accipitur_"--is received whole and entire in Holy Communion. The history of the passage of this measure through Parliament makes it clear that many of the Bishops and other prominent ecclesiastics were opposed to this departure from existing Catholic usage and that it was in reality imposed by the authority of Parliament upon the Church under the plea that it was "conformable to primitive practice." The Bill was but the beginning of other and more important changes. The replies made at this time by Cranmer and other