with such a halo of affection and reverence as would go far to obscure their fatal mistakes, they could have taken no more efficacious means than giving them the opportunity of dying with the majesty of heroism.

Το

Controversy will always be active round the memory of Laud. Lovers of liberty, freedom of thought, and the and the simplicity of scriptural religion, as revived by Cranmer and the Reformers, will have no sympathy whatever with the policy for which he paid his life. those who find their ideal in strict ecclesiastical discipline, the active discouragement of dissent, the doctrine of the offering of the sacrifice of Christ by a Priest in Holy Communion, and an elaborate external ritual, Laud will appear little less than a martyr.

We are indebted to Dr. careful Life of Laud in the

Gairdner for a Dictionary of seven volumes

National Biography. There are of his own works, republished in the AngloCatholic Library as part of the literature of the Oxford movement. A highly eulogistic biography of him was written by his disciple Heylin, under the title of Cyprianus Anglicus. His victim and relentless enemy Prynne published his accusations in his Hidden Works of

Darkness and Canterbury's Doom. The letters and State papers of the time are of course full of references and information, and in every history of the period he supplies a leading character.

He was born at Reading, October 7th, 1573, twenty-three years after the death of Cranmer, in the fourteenth year of the reign of Elizabeth. He was the only son of William Laud, a clothier. His mother, Lucy Webbe, had been married before to another clothier, John Robinson, and had several children. After some years at Reading Free School, William went to St. John's College, Oxford, in 1589, and next year obtained a Reading scholarship. In 1593 he became Fellow; 1594, B.A.; 1598, M.A.; 1608, D.D. His College tutor was John Buckeridge, afterwards Bishop of Rochester, Bath and Wells, and Ely, who had headed the reaction at the Universities against Calvinism, and was the life-long friend of Bishop Andrewes; what would be called now a moderate High Churchman, "standing between Roman Catholicism on the one hand and Puritanism on the other, laying stress on sacramental grace and the episcopal organisation of the Church of England." Under his guidance Laud became

a patient student of the Fathers; but although his subsequent Controversy with Fisher the Jesuit became the most famous of his works, he had neither aptitude nor liking for theological inquiry and argument; he showed little understanding of the position of the Reformers; he took the poetical, metaphorical language of the early Greek fathers in a precise, literal way; and while repudiating the technicalities of Transubstantiation, became a determined adherent of the post-Cyprianic view of the Real Local Presence in the Holy Communion, not (as the Reformers had held) of Christ's Presence in the heart of the worthy recipient, but, in a spiritual manner, in the consecrated elements. It followed that a real Priest offered up the sacrifice of Christ at an altar. The third view which distinguished him from the Reformers was, that the Visible Church in his eyes was not chiefly "a congregation of faithful men in which the pure Word of God is preached and the Sacraments duly administered in all things requisite to the same," but rather a hierarchy with the authority of the Apostles handed down by the laying on of hands from generation to generation, and that outside that hierarchy there was no Church.

According to

this opinion, the Reformed Churches which had not been able to obtain episcopal ordination were not Churches at all, even in an imperfect way; while the Church of Rome, however errant, was a true, and indeed the oldest, largest, and most important branch of the whole Visible Catholic Church of Christ. It is not astonishing that a generation brought up under the influence of the five preceding primates— Parker, Grindal, Whitgift, Bancroft, and Abbot -should view these opinions as Popery. Popery to them meant, not merely the usurpation of the Bishop of Rome, but a great mass of unscriptural doctrine which had prevailed in this country, as in the rest of Europe, with increasing degrees of intensity since, at any rate, the Roman mission of Augustine. There had been enough truth underlying the corruptions to constitute a true Church; and the work of the Reformation had been simply to compare the corruptions with Scripture, and with the earliest and best of the primitive Fathers, and deliberately to exclude them as far as it was possible for human words. Through the ambiguity of the word Sacrament, which in some writers meant the Elements, in others the whole Ordinance, Laud was able to quote the

Reformers as if they maintained what alone the Roman Church cared about-the Local Presence of the Body and Blood in the Elements. He argued against Transubstantiation, but Transubstantiation appeared a mere theoretical explanation of such a Presence; if once the Localised Presence in the Elements was admitted, Transubstantiation was not worth arguing about. What the Reformed Church of England in Laud's time believed was that there was a Presence of Christ in the Ordinance, effectual to the faithful recipient, through his faith in receiving the hallowed emblems of the Passion; when once that point was clear, they did not care how strong the language might be which they used as to the reality of that Presence in the heart. What Laud cared about was the spiritual Presence in the Elements, invoked by the word of the Priest. Again, Laud's generation believed that they had got rid of the doctrine of the Priest offering in the Holy Communion the unbloody sacrifice of Christ's Body and Blood. "Beware, lest it [the Holy Communion] be made a sacrifice."

the language of an authorised homily not long before composed. Metaphorical sacrifices there were; the unconsecrated bread and wine as