Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. REIGN OF EDWARD VI. Persecutions stopped. Doctrinal disputes revived. Book of Homilies. First service book: revised: never satisfactory to the Reformers. Supposed necessity of forming such a liturgy as to keep the Popish people in the Church. Discrepancy between the Articles and Offices. Prayer Book an equivocal standard: fairly quoted by each of two irrecon- cileable schemes. The question of a Liturgy. No right anywhere to impose one. Imposed not by the Church, but by Parliament and Council. Uniformity enforced. Reforming the Ordinal. Rise of the Puritans. Edward VI. came to the throne in the 10th year of his age, A.D. 1547, seventy-three years before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. The directorship of the faith and worship of the kingdom having been vested in the crown, it now fell into the hands of the Executive council, named by Henry VIII., and of the young king; who had been trained under instructors selected by Cran- mer, and early imbued with the true principles of the gospel. By all Protestant author!ties,Edward VI. is regarded, for his enlightened views, his solid judgment beyond his years, and his conscientious regard for righteousness and truth, the wonder of his age. He was surrounded by a bright galaxy of Reformers. There was the meek and guileless Cranmer, whom the truth and the Spirit of God had led from the darkness of Popery to a discovery of the way of life through faith in Christ alone ; and yet he had been so gradually led, that he always retained the confidence of that tyrant monster Henry VIII., who would in an instant have committed him to the flames, had he dreamed that his favorite was capable of ever exchanging the dogmas of popery for the doctrines of the Reformation. There, too, was the venerable and true-hearted Latimer, th...