It would be easy to take a more extensive sweep of contemporary history, as others have done, and to adorn our narrative with the spoils--for the stirring times here treated of, supply abundant materials for such a purpose; but it is better, perhaps, to follow our subject closely up, putting aside many collateral incidents, not, indeed, as without their influence on the Reformation, but as holding a very subordinate place in it; and thus to keep our eye single, neither distracting it by too much diversity, nor perplexing it by too much detail. For, in general, the most profitable method of treating a complicated subject, perhaps, is, not to open up every particular, great and small, which may bear upon it in its degree; but rather to filter the rush of matter which presents itself, and, striving to make a small book, which is a hard thing, instead of a large one, which is most easy, to place the reader in possession of such events only as served to stamp the times to which they belonged, or serve now to characterise them, and then to leave him to his own reflection or to his own study to fill up the picture. The first of those successive publications, by the circulation of which Cranmer built up the faith of his country, was _Erasmus’s Paraphrase of the New Testament_, translated into English, a copy of which, as well as of the Bible, was to be set up in every parish church; the next, a volume of _Homilies_, twelve in number. The paraphrase Cranmer himself did not maintain to be perfect; but it was the best upon which he could lay his hand; moreover, as executed by a member of the church of Rome, (from whose eyes, however, the scales were fast falling,) it was calculated, he might think (and an expression which drops from him confirms this),[351] for a church in a state of transition like our own; Gardiner offered many captious objections to it; others, which might have been urged with more show of reason, he was not, perhaps, the man to discover or propound. Had he compared it with similar writings of some other of the reformers, he would have found that, in making such a choice, Cranmer, so far from intending to irritate, could only be led by a desire to conciliate the Catholics as much as might be without a compromise. Had he compared, for instance, Erasmus’s paraphrase of the Galatians with the commentary of Luther on the same epistle--had he contrasted the caution of the one interpreter with the intrepidity, not to say hardihood, of the other; the different degrees of animation with which the great evangelical doctrines, and those the most obnoxious to the Roman catholics, are respectively handled by them; the different degrees of keenness they discover in the detection of those doctrines under the same texts; the more or less reserved sense in which the works of the law are understood as affecting justification; not to speak of the direct fulminations against the church of Rome, which Luther takes every