its very title-page.

The new foundation of religious

truth was to be regarded throughout England as a gift, not from the Church but from the King.. It is Henry on his throne who gives the sacred volume to Cranmer, ere Cranmer and Cromwell can distribute it to the throng of priests and laymen below. The Bible was formally adopted as the basis of English faith." A copy of Coverdale's translation was chained to a desk or pillar in every cathedral and parish church. The joy of the common people knew no bounds. Ability to read was looked upon as the most enviable of acquisitions, and knots of people stood all day long to hear read to them in their own tongue the wonderful works of God.1 The next stage in the history of the English Bible was the appearance, in 1550, of the celebrated Genevan version, which became the household Bible of the English middle classes for at least two generations. This was mainly the work of the refugees who were driven from the kingdom by the Marian persecution and settled at Geneva, where they adopted the faith of Calvin and the Genevan mode of worship. It contained a marginal commentary which proved a great attraction to the Puritans. For nearly a hundred years it held the field in the estimation of the

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1 "It was wonderful," says Foxe the Martyrologist, “to see with what joy this book of God was received, not only among the learneder sort, and those that were noted for lovers of the Reformation, but generally all England over, among all the vulgar and common people; and with what greediness God's word was read, and what resort to places where the reading of it was. Everybody that could bought the book, or busily read it, or got others to read it to them if they could not themselves, and divers more elderly people learned to read on purpose; and even little boys flocked among the rest to hear portions of the Holy Scripture read."

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English people, and this notwithstanding the fact that the Puritan theology, or, speaking more strictly, the theology of Geneva, was most conspicuous in its anotations. "So earnestly," says Strype, "did the people of the nation thirst in those days after the knowledge of the Scriptures, that the first impression was soon sold off."

The influence of the Bible and the revolution it effected in the mind and character of the English people have been thus eloquently described by Mr. Green: "No greater moral change ever passed over the nation than passed over England during the years which parted the middle of the reign of Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. England became the people of a book, and that book was the Bible. It was, as yet, the one English book which was familiar to every Englishman; it was read at churches and read at home, and everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm."

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Foxe's Book of Martyrs.-Next only to the Bible, in the influence it exercised upon the minds of the English people, was that moving and picturesque narrative of the sufferings of the martyrs which, despite its errors and prejudices, has done more, perhaps, for the cause of Protestantism than any other book that ever was written. By Elizabeth's own order this book was elevated to the dignity of being placed along with the

1 See whole of this eloquent passage in "Puritan England," Green's Short History of the English People, pp. 447-9.

Bible, Homilies, and Prayer-Book, in all the colleges and chapels throughout the kingdom. It passed naturally into every English household, and its popularity was such that no other book has been able to vie with it-with the exception of the Pilgrim's Progress. The circulation of this book, and the avidity with which it was read by all classes of the people, not only helped to create an intense Protestant sentiment, it did much also to lodge in their minds the Puritan conception of religion, and to erect this as the strongest of all bulwarks against the encroachments and pretensions of papal power. Foxe was himself a Puritan, and when required by Archbishop Parker to subscribe to the Canons of the Church of England, he evinced his Puritan loyalty to the Scriptures by holding up a Greek Testament and exclaiming: "To this will I subscribe."

Disfigured as his great work must be judged to be, both by errors and the spirit of intolerance, it is pleasant to remember that he intervened in the cause of the hated and despised Anabaptists, and petitioned the Queen, though unsuccessfully, to spare the lives of two of them. He hated impartially all religious persecution, in this respect rising far above his age and contemporary Protestant convictions.

The growth of the spirit of freedomLiberty of conscience." The real value of the religious revolution of the sixteenth century to mankind," says Mr. Green, "lay not in its substitution of one creed for another, but in the new spirit of inquiry, the new freedom of thought and of discussion which was awakened

during the process of change." The immediate effect of the Reformation in England, as Macaulay has pointed out, was by no means favourable to political liberty. It only deposed the papal system to set up its worst tyranny afresh in the person of King and Prelate. The yoke of Protestantism promised to be just as intolerable as that of the Church of Rome, nay, as being nearer the base of its operations, more galling and inimical to individual freedom. The system of Henry VIII. has been described as Popery without the Pope; and had the Reformation stopped at the point to which it was carried by means of the breach with Rome, it would have been, not a forward, but a retrograde movement. But it could not stop at that point. It is the inevitable result of any great disruption such as that which had taken place in England and Europe, that forces and influences are let loose and brought into play which those who are responsible for its initiation are unable to guide and powerless. to control. It is like a landslip, the effects of which are seen, not only in the immediate dislodgment of a vast quantity of earth, but in a loosening of the soil which extends far beyond the scene of the primal catastrophe. The earthquake which releases Paul and Silas, throws down for others besides apostles the walls of the prisonhouse. Religious freedom is never long divorced from civil and political liberty.1 It was the stirring of men's minds under the preaching of Wyclif that was the real if not the proximate cause of the peasants' outbreak in 1381 and the insurrection under Wat Tyler. Wyclif

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Oh, if we could but exercise wisdom to gain civil libertyreligion would follow!"-Cromwell's Letters and Speeches.

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himself was as guiltless of the revolt of the peasantry as was Luther of the Peasant War in Germany, or of the reign of the Anabaptists. Nevertheless, neither of these Reformers could screen themselves from the responsibility which, indirectly at least, attached to their own acts and teaching. They both of them raised a spirit they were not able to lay, and the people who imbibed their doctrines insisted on carrying them to their extreme, and, as they deemed, their only logical conclusion. The same thing is illustrated in the progress of the Reformation. genius of liberty--if we may use the impersonationoutran the zeal of its defenders, even its most strenuous upholders, and chiding their lagging pace seemed to mock their timorous mistrust. Not even the most advanced and intrepid Reformers, in England at least, realised the full consequences of their own action. Terrified by their own boldness, they were ever harking back like men venturing on quicksands or skating on thin ice, and only by feeling their way gradually could they gain confidence to proceed. In our age, experience of the value of liberty has to a large extent conquered the instinct of conservatism, but in the age of the Reformation men had no such experience. It is not surprising, therefore, that even the most ardent lovers of liberty should sometimes falter in their testimony for it. In the course of our inquiry we shall see how far the Puritans themselves fell short of acting with perfect loyalty to their own principles, and how long it took them to learn the lesson of religious toleration. Like the disciples of old, "as they followed they were afraid"; but they followed nevertheless, and they came out at length into a wealthy land.