and the invention of printing. There is no reason in the nature of things why the latter should have been delayed to the end of the fifteenth century. The art of writing was in use among the Egyptians long anterior to the time of Abraham, and it would seem as if the transition from writing to printing ought to have been effected without much difficulty, yet written characters had been in the possession of the world for five or six thousand years before printing was ever heard of. It was in the year 1474 that the first printing-press was erected in Westminster by William Caxton, an event which "did more for England than all the battles of kings or the statutes of Parliaments." The time was indeed most opportune. The introduction of printing synchronised with the Renaissance, that wonderful intellectual awakening which has caused the fifteenth century to be styled the "age of discovery of the world and of man." might have been expected, it gave to the New Learning a mighty impulse. It contributed to the spread of knowledge through all sections of society, and the clergy, who had hitherto kept the key of knowledge in their own hands, at the beginning of the fifteenth century found that the laity were in no wise inferior to them in this respect. At the same time it put into the hand of those who attacked the abuses and corruptions of the Church a most formidable weapon, which they were not slow to use. This helped the cause of the Reformation immensely. But undoubtedly the chief service which printing rendered to the cause of truth and liberty was the multiplying of copies of the Bible. Until the reign of Henry VIII. the Bible had existed only in manuscript

As

form. This was the translation (a translation of a translation, be it remembered) of Wyclif. After the death of Wyclif and the plague of Lollardism had been stamped out, or supposed to have been stamped out, by the energy and vigilance of the Popish party, the use of the Bible was rigidly proscribed, and according to a statute of Henry v. it was enacted that all who read the Scriptures in their native tongue should forfeit land, cattle, life, goods, they and their heirs for ever.

It was in the year 1525 that William Tyndale brought out his edition of the New Testament. His version of the Scriptures and reprint of the tracts of Wyclif, though printed in Germany, soon found their way into England. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the New Learning had established itself and been the means of producing a widespread intellectual and religious awakening, became the seed-plot of this new heresy, and here it found a congenial and fruitful nidus.

A trans

The dream of Erasmus was at last realised. lation of the Bible had appeared which the weaver might repeat at his shuttle and the ploughman might intone at the plough. The edition of 1540 was called the Great Bible, and there was prefixed to it a preface by Archbishop Cranmer; and from this circumstance the Great Bible is often, but improperly, called Cranmer's Bible. "This

This

is the Byble apoynted to the use of the churches." Bible was sold at 13s. 4d., " unless Cromwell would give the printers exclusive privileges, when it might be sold for 10s." This would represent a much larger sum in those days than in ours-about the value of £6. "The story of the supremacy," says Mr. Green, " was graven in

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

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."

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." "" 1

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. hated impartially all religious persecution, in this respect rising far above his age and contemporary Protestant convictions.

He

The growth of the spirit of freedom – Liberty 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