with unwashen hands; and it is remarkable that, though according to the strict letter of the Levitical law the Passover was to be partaken of with loins girded, and shoes on the feet, and a staff in the hand, and in haste, Jesus appears to have acquiesced in a custom long established, and to have sat down with his disciples, and to have conversed with them at his leisure, one of them leaning upon his bosom. An attempt has been made by some to claim Cranmer as belonging to the same party in his heart, howbeit restrained by force of circumstances from fully declaring himself. They would persuade us that he was prepared to have gone much further in his Book of Common Prayer, (such, say they, was the report amongst the English exiles at Frankfort,)[399] but that a wicked clergy and convocation held his hand; and that more was meant than met the ear, even when under the cruel mockery of his accusers, as they stripped him of the canvass pontificals in which they had arrayed him, he observed, “that it needed not; for he had done with that gear long before.”[400] That he set no greater store by the innocent trappings of his office than was due to them from a man of sense and piety may be well believed; he had already said as much: “If the bishops of this realm,” he remarks in a letter to Cromwell, “pass no more of their names, styles, and titles, than I do of mine, the King’s Highness shall soon order the matter betwixt us.... For I pray God never to be merciful to me at the general judgment if I perceive in my heart that I set more by any title, name, or style, that I write, than I do by the paring of an apple, further than it shall be to the setting forth of God’s word and will.” Let it, however, be remembered, that these words were written by Cranmer in vindication of himself against the idle but malicious charge of Gardiner, that by assuming the title of “Primate of all England” he had trenched upon the King’s supremacy, and that the period at which they were written was the year 1535, when as yet the Puritan question had not been stirred.[401] But though the general character of the Archbishop’s mind, which was averse from extremes of every kind, is enough to oppose to any claim of this description, there are, besides, some distinct particulars in his history, which argue clearly enough that if he did not foresee the danger of the Puritan principle, he at least had no inclination to lend himself to its advancement. To Hooper’s imaginations he did not give place, no not for an hour, resolutely opposing even the King’s letter of recommendation that the ceremonies used in consecration might in his particular case be dispensed with;[402] a degree of obduracy this, at which the martyrologist (whose bias is well known) significantly hints, “for he will name nobody,” as culpable in the Archbishop, and such as called for the Cross to put an end by a real and terrible visitation to unworthy contentions, and to unite men who ought never to have