The point on which he chiefly rested his orthodoxy happened to be the real presence; that very doctrine, in which, among the numberless victories of superstition over common sense, her triumph is the most signal and egregious.

All departure from this principle he held to be heretical and detestable; and nothing, he thought, would be more honorable for him, than, while he broke off all connections with the Roman pontiff, to maintain, in this essential article, the purity of the Catholic faith.
There was one Lambert,[*] a schoolmaster in London, who had been questioned and confined for unsound opinions by Archbishop Warham; but upon the death of that prelate, and the change of counsels at court, he had been released.

Not terrified with the danger which he had incurred, he still continued to promulgate his tenets; and having heard Dr.Taylor afterwards bishop of Lincoln, defend in a sermon the corporal presence, he could not forbear expressing to Taylor his dissent from that doctrine; and he drew up his objections under ten several heads.

Taylor communicated the paper to Dr.Barnes, who happened to be a Lutheran, and who maintained that though the substance of bread and wine remained, in the sacrament, yet the real body and blood of Christ were there also, and were, in a certain mysterious manner, incorporated with the material elements.
* Fox, vol.ii.p.

396.
By the present laws and practice Barnes was no less exposed to the stake than Lambert; yet such was the persecuting rage which prevailed, that he determined to bring this man to condign punishment; because of their common departure from the ancient faith, he had dared to go one step farther than himself.