Immediately after the revival of the statute, it was Gardiner’s unwelcome duty, with thirteen other bishops and a number of laymen, to sit in a commission of inquiry into the teaching of four Churchmen, Hooper, the deprived Bishop of Gloucester; Rogers, Prebendary of St. Paul’s; Saunders, Rector of Allhallows, and Taylor, Rector of Hadley in Sussex. This was the only occasion on which Gardiner presided over a trial for heresy. Hooper, by far the most distinguished of the four, had had a singularly chequered career, even for those stirring times. Perhaps even more than Cranmer, he had come under the influence of the German reformers. He had entered the cloister at an early age, and had graduated as a religious at Oxford, but had returned to secular life, after some fray in which he was concerned. He fed his mind on the writings of Zwingli and Bullinger, and identified himself so closely with their opinions, that on the promulgation of the _Six Articles_ he was obliged to fly the country. He went to Zürich, the hot-bed of Calvinism, and there attacked Gardiner’s book on the Holy Eucharist. On Edward’s accession, he returned to England, and continued the controversy in a lecture which he delivered on the 1st September 1549. This lecture brought him into notice and favour with the Council, and when Bonner attacked his doctrine in a powerful sermon preached to a large congregation at St. Paul’s, Hooper retaliated by denouncing the Bishop of London.[540] Bonner was therefore examined as to his belief in the dogma in question, deprived, and sent to the Tower. But although Hooper was now made King’s Preacher, he did not allow himself to exult greatly over his good fortune. “Sharp and dangerous,” said he, “has been my contest with that bishop; if he be restored again to his office, I shall be restored to my Father which is in heaven.”[541] He threw himself with ardour into the war then raging against altars, vestments, priests and bishops, putting himself at the head of the Gospellers. None of his contemporaries surpassed him in forcible language. In 1551 some altars were still standing in the diocese of Chichester, in spite of the decree of the Council, that they should be destroyed, and Masses were still surreptitiously offered at some of them.[542] “The bishops and priests do damnable and devilish superstition,” he exclaimed in one of his sermons,[543] “saying Mass, conjuring the holy water bucket and the like, in the congregation of God.... Into the sea with all clerks who will not preach the true doctrine and teach the catechism.” The Council owed it mainly to Hooper, if their behests were at last obeyed. “So long as the altars remain, the ignorant people and evil-persuaded priests will dream of sacrifice,” he persisted, until even the places where the altars had stood were whitewashed, so that no vestige of them might remain. In one of his pungent sermons, he went so far as to condemn Cranmer’s new Prayer Book, as savouring too much of Popery.