occasion to launch, and Erasmus to withhold;--if he had thus done, probably Luther’s most powerful treatise would not, indeed, have made him a convert to his opinions; Cranmer himself most likely would have disavowed, or at least tempered, several of them; but it would have at any rate satisfied him that the archbishop had far more offensive weapons in his armoury than those which he thought proper on this occasion to produce. The objections which Gardiner directed against the _Homilies_ were many of them just enough in logic, though feeble in themselves, for it was alleged, that the doctrines of the Homilies and of the King’s Book did not always agree; nor did they: but this only served to show (what was the truth) that, when the latter was published, Cranmer was counteracted by other influence; or else (what was equally the truth) that his own opinions had in the interval undergone considerable revision. Justification by faith only, a doctrine which in the King’s Book had been greatly qualified, is made a leading principle in the Homilies; and certain superstitions of the church of Rome, which in the former were tolerated, if not encouraged, in the latter were absolutely forbidden.[352] It may be noticed, in passing, that on some points, as on that of human corruption for instance, a tone of greater moderation prevails in this book of the Homilies than in the other, which appeared in 1562, prepared by Queen Elizabeth’s bishops, principally, it has been said, by Jewel.[353] Such a volume had been promised in an advertisement affixed to the former one; and many of the subjects actually treated in it are there enumerated, though not all: but the composition, it should seem, was reserved for those who completed the Reformation. In neither case, however, can the several Homilies be assigned to their several authors with any certainty. At the same time in the first volume (for with regard to the second no single Homily of them all has been appropriated,) there is reason to think that the one on “salvation” is Cranmer’s own; as perhaps those on “faith” and “good works;”[354] and internal evidence arising out of certain homely expressions, and peculiar forms of ejaculation, the like to which occur in Latimer’s sermons, pretty clearly betrays the hand of the Bishop of Worcester to have been engaged in the homily against “brawling and contention;” the one against “adultery” may be safely given to Thomas Becon, one of Cranmer’s chaplains, in whose works, published in 1564, it is still to be found; of the rest nothing is known but by the merest conjecture.[355] On the whole, the key to the right understanding of either volume is not the Calvinistic controversy; for amongst all the Homilies, as Bishop Burnet observes, there are none relating to the divine decrees[356]--but the horror of papal abuses, which drove the compilers into some hearty expressions in contradiction to them, particularly in those for the Nativity and Whitsunday--expressions