THE HEAVEN OF ROME AND of Scripture CONTRASTED. 299

and tongues, cast their crowns before God; and I heard their solemn gratitude peal through the Courts of Glory-"Not unto us, oh, Lord! not unto us, but to thy name, be the praise of our salvation, from the sins and from the sorrows of earth." They were before the throne of Christ. They bent at their appointed distance before that throne; but they were not Mediators with Him." But a change came o'er the spirit of my dream." Another Heaven, than the Heaven of the apocalypse-the Heaven of the Church of Rome was before me.

One Intercessor no longer stood between God and man. The mercy-seat of Christ was possessed by other Mediators and other Intercessors. Rome had commanded them to be there, and a long train of the canonized, the holy and the unholy, the spurious and the dubious, of Hermits and of Popes, of Confessors and of Martyrs, shared the throne with the Son of the Living God. They did not cast their golden crowns before Him. They wore their crowns of glory, as the Brother-Mediators; aye, and as the Mother-Mediator, and as the Sister-Mediators, with Christ the Lord. So had Rome commanded. Dominic and Francis, Hildebrand and Innocent, Becket and the Virgin, with nameless thousands more, were all Mediators together. The Virgin, the blessed Virgin, methought, blushed amidst the glory of Heaven, at the company in which Rome had placed her. She turned from the aspirations and praises of her votaries, when they called her "Queen of Heaven," and when they prayed to her, and not

300

VISION OF BONNER PRAYING FOR GARDINER.

66

to Christ as the bruiser of the serpent's head. She bent before the throne of her Redeemer and Prince. "My soul," she said, "doth magnify the Lord alone, my spirit hath rejoiced, and it shall rejoice, in God my Saviour.-My soul abhors the prayers and the 'praises which are given to me and not to Him. This 66 only lessens the felicities of Heaven, that the believers in the religion of my God and Saviour should 'give to me the blessed Virgin the homage which "is due to the bruiser of the serpent's head alone." I saw in my vision that the blessed Virgin fled from the society in which Rome had placed her, towards the bright glory which shone above her. Dominic and Francis, Hildebrand and Innocent, Becket and Borromeo, Aquinas and Bonaventura, remained on the throne of the Mediator. Suddenly a voice was heard from England. The soul of Gardiner, redolent with the blood of Ridley and Latimer, appeared among the spirits of the newly dead. The voice was the voice of Bonner. The prayer was the prayer of Bonner. It implored Becket and Hildebrand, Innocent and Dominic, to intercede with God and Christ for the soul of Gardiner. Other voices ascended with the voice of Bonner. Mary and Philip, and Pole and Story, who boasted that he "threw the faggot in "the face of a Psalm-singer at the stake, and pricked "his mouth as he then and there commended his soul

to God"—were heard to pray with Bonner, to the Saints of Rome, to Dominic and Becket, to Hildebrand and Innocent, that the soul of Gardiner might

BONNER AND THE TRACTARIANS ON THE LITURGY. 301

share their glories; and be with them partakers of that Heaven, "from which they had banished the "souls of the Protestants." Neither was this all. Still I seemed to listen: and other voices from England and Oxford were heard. The voices of prayer to the Saints whom Rome had placed on the throne of the Mediator had ceased to rise from the Church of England, and from its best child, Oxford: but still I listened and though no voice arose from the Church, methought I heard a faint whisper from Oxford, in this my own day, that "the satisfactions of the souls departed may be increased by the prayers of the living," and I awoke-and it was not a dream.

The next object, which we hold in common with Bonner and ourselves, is the substitution of a better Liturgy than the present. Our friend Froude considered our present Communion Service as a judgment on the Church; and he, with others of our friends, would gladly consent to see our Communion Service replaced by a good translation of the Liturgy of "St. Peter; a name which he advises his corres"pondent to substitute for the obnoxious phrase of "Mass-book:"† and our brother Newman calls the Canon of the Mass, that "sacred and most precious monument of the Apostles, which our Reformers (whom Froude calls "snobs," and "such a set,”‡)

* Froude's Remains, p. 410. Froude's Remains, p. 387. Froude, p. 393, &c., and p. 484.

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BONNER DERIDES THE ULTRA-PROTESTANTS

"received whole and entire from their predecessors; "but the Reformers mutilated the traditions of fif"teen hundred years. ."* Froude says also, as I have before quoted, that "the Prayer-book has no greater "claim to our deference than the Missal, and the

Breviary, in a far greater degree":† and I shall not repeat again my own preference of the glory of the first or unreformed temple, to the diminished glory of the second or reformed present service. Now in all this our opinions are identical with those of Bonner, and the Government of his day—and I should indeed, therefore, be a hypocrite if I did not boldly say so. I will select a few of the expressions in which the illustrious Bonner, in common with the Puritans, the Papists, and the Tractarians condemned the existing services of the reformed Church of England-"Because, (he says in his articles against one of the Ultra-Protestants whom he burned,) "the "service of the Church, in the days of King Ed"ward, was alleged to be abominable, heretical, schis"matical, and altogether naught:" he, therefore, the said delinquent, openly affirms, "that the present "service (restored under Queen Mary) is also abo"minable, heretical," &c. In the proclamation of the 13th of June, 1555, by the King and Queen, restraining the publication of all books and writings, tending against the doctrine of the Pope, after the

Newman's Reply to Faussett, pp. 46, 47.

+ Froude's Remains, vol. 1, p. 402.

Foxe, vol. vii., p. 121.

FOR THEIR ATTACHMENT TO THE PRAYER BOOK. 303

enumeration of the works of Martin Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Latimer, Hooper, Coverdale, Tyndale, Cranmer, Frith, and many others,-it is commanded that none presume to write, print, sell, keep, or cause to be written, &c., &c., the Communion Book, or Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, set forth by the authority of Parliament, to be used in the Churches of this realm in the reign of Edward the Sixth.* "I object to you," (said Bonner to others, who were burnt) "that you have en"deavoured, to the utmost of your power, to restore "the English Service and Communion in all points, "as it was used in the latter days of Edward the "Sixth." That is, he objected, as I and my friends object, to the second Service-book of King Edward. "I call upon you," (said Bonner to Philpott) "to 66 answer to the Catechism set forth in the schis"matical time of King Edward." The Reformers, indeed, did as much for the second Service-book of King Edward, our present Prayer-book, (with some few subsequent alterations,) as for any other object. "God be thanked," said Rowland Taylor, (in his reply to Bourn, who questioned him on the subject of the Prayer-book, in the presence of Bonner and

*

Foxe, vol. vii., pp. 127-28. See the same proclamations also in Strype (p. 250) and Burnet; both of whom, throughout the whole of their histories, acknowledge themselves, I grieve to say it, principally indebted to the stores of John Foxe. + Foxe, vol. vii., p. 324.

Foxe, vol. vii,, p. 648.