be more erroneous than to measure the contemporary by the posthumous influence of a great name. Milton is not mentioned by Lord Clarendon (who forgets nobody that stamped his own times), nor yet by Baxter, whose writings are voluminous, and by whom it was to be expected that he would be had in honour. And in like manner, splendid as eventually became the fame of Calvin, it was comparatively inconsiderable when our church was in building, being eclipsed by the burning and shining light of Luther’s name; so that whilst a sermon of the latter is advertised in England in 1547, as a work “of the famous clerk of _worthy memory_, Dr. Martin Luther,” a treatise of Calvin is sent forth in 1549 (two years later), as “written by Master John Calvin, a man of _right excellent learning and no less conversation_,” as though his fame as yet required the help of a herald;[389] neither, it may be observed, does the term Calvinist find a place in the pages of Fox. And though a body of men there was in the times of our first Reformers, and by them certainly accounted schismatics, to whom the name of _Free-Willers_ was given, (and a singular instance of the predominance of the intellectual over the mere animal part of our nature it is, that the metaphysical questions to which the name points should have disturbed the prison-house of persons who were about to die, perhaps, on the morrow, at the stake[390],) still the tenets of these men were not such as were afterwards called Arminian, but were strictly Pelagian, being in gross disparagement of a Redeemer’s merits, and of a Sanctifier’s help, and as such were stoutly combated by the founders of our Church.[391] That the freedom of the will was not, in itself, a doctrine offensive to Cranmer, but the contrary, is certain; and in a Letter to Cromwell, recently published[392] from an original manuscript in the Chapter-house at Westminster, the Archbishop, speaking of the seditious conduct of one Sir Thomas Baschurch, a priest, writes, “At April next coming it shall be three years since the said Sir Thomas fell into despair, and thereby into a sickness, so that he was in peril of death. Of this sickness, within a quarter of a year after, he recovered, but saith he is assured that he shall be perpetually damned. _My chaplains and divers other learned men have reasoned with him_, but no man can bring him to other opinion but that he, like unto Esau, was created unto damnation; and hath, divers times and sundry ways, attempted to kill himself; but by diligent looking unto he hath hitherto been preserved.” Moreover, the selection which Cranmer made of Erasmus’s Paraphrase, as the exposition of Scripture of which every church was to have a copy, argues no Calvinistic prejudices, but the very reverse.