Phila delphia > The History of Protestantism by J. A. Wylie Web WStS  powered by Google™

IT is around the person and ministry of Wicliffe that the dawn of the new times is seen to break. Down to his day the powers of superstition had continued to grow, and the centuries as they passed over the world beheld the night deepening around the human soul, and the slavery in which the nations were sunk becoming ever viler. But with the appearance of Wicliffe the darkness fulfils its period, and the great tide of evil begins to be rolled back. From the times of the English Reformer we are able to trace two great currents in Christendom, which have never intermitted their flow from that day to this. The one is seen steadily bearing down into ruin the great empire of Roman superstition and bondage; the other is seen lifting higher and higher the kingdom of truth and liberty.

Let us for a moment consider, first, the line of calamities which fell on the anti-Christian interest, drying up the sources of its power, and paving the way for its final destruction; and next, that grand chain of beneficent dispensations, beginning with Wicliffe, which came to revive the cause of righteousness, all but extinct.

In the days of Wicliffe came the Papal schism, the first opening in that compact tyranny which had so long burdened the earth and defied the heavens. Next, and as a consequence, came the struggles of the Councils against the Papal autocracy: these were followed by a series of terrible wars, first in France and next in England, by which the nobles in both countries were nearly exterminated. These wars broke the power of feudalism, and raised the kings above the Papal chair. This was the first step in the emancipation of the nations; and by the opening of the sixteenth century, the process was so far advanced that we find only three great thrones in Europe, whose united power was more than a match for the Popedom, but whose conflicting interests kept open the door for the escape of the nations.

When we turn to the other line of events, we find it too taking its rise at the feet, so to speak, of Wicliffe. First comes the translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue, with the consequent spread of Lollardism – in other words, of Protestant doctrines in England; this was followed by the fall of Constantinople, and the scattering of the seeds of knowledge over the West; by the invention of the art of printing, and other discoveries which aided the awakening of the human mind; and finally by the diffusion of the light to Bohemia and other countries; and ultimately by the second great opening of the day in the era of Luther and the Reformers. From the Divine seed deposited by the hand of Wicliffe spring all the influences and events that constitute the modern times. The reforming movements which we have traced in both the Lutheran and the Calvinistic countries are about to culminate in the British Reformation – the top-stone which crowns the edifice of the sixteenth century.

The action into which the English nation had been roused by the instrumentality of Wicliffe took a dual form. With one party it was a struggle for religious truth, with the other it was a contest for national independence. These were but two phases of one great movement, and both were needed to create a perfect and powerful Protestantism. For if the corruptions of the Papacy had rendered necessary a reformation of doctrine, not less had the encroachments and usurpations of the Vatican necessitated a vindication of the national liberties. The successive laws placed on the statute-book during the reigns of Henry V and Henry VI, remain the monuments of the great struggle waged by England to disenthrall herself from the fetters of the Papal supremacy. These we have narrated down to the times of Henry VIII, where we now resume our narrative.

Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509, and thus the commencement of his reign was contemporaneous with the birth of Calvin, of Knox, and of others who were destined, by their genius and their virtues, to lend to the age now opening a glory which their contemporaries, Henry and Francis and Charles, never could have given it by their arms or their statesmanship. It was a long while since any English king had mounted the throne with such a prospect of a peaceful and glorious reign, as the young prince who now grasped the scepter which had been swayed by Alfred the Great. Uniting in his person the rival claims of York and Lancaster, he received the warm devotion of the adherents of both houses. Of majestic port, courteous manners, and frank and open disposition, he was the idol of the people. Destined to fill the See of Canterbury, his naturally vigorous understanding had been improved by a carefully conducted education, and his mental accomplishments far exceeded the customary measure of the princes of his age. He had a taste for letters, he delighted in the society of scholars, and lie prodigally lavished in his patronage of literature, and the gaieties and entertainments for which he had a fondness, those vast. treasures which the avarice and parsimony of his father, Henry VII, had accumulated. The court paid to him by the two powerful monarchs of France and Spain, who each strove to have Henry as his ally, also tended to enhance his importance in the eyes of his subjects, and increase their devotion to him. To his youth, to the grace ,of his person, to the splendor of his court, and the wit and gaiety of his talk, there was added the prestige that comes from success in arms, though on a small scale. The conquest of Tournay in France, and the victory of Flodden in Scotland, were just enough to gild with a gleam of military glory the commencement of his reign, and enhance the favorable auspices under which it opened. But we turn from Henry to contemplate persons of lower degree, but of more inherent grandeur, and whose lives were destined in yield richer fruit to the realm of England. It is not at the foot of the throne of Henry that the Reformation is seen to take its rise. The movement took root in England a full century before he was born, or a Tudor had ascended the throne. Henry will reappear on the stage in his own time; meanwhile we leave the palace and enter the school.

The first; of those illustrious men with whom we are now to be concerned is Dr. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's. The young Colet was a student at Oxford, but disgusted with the semi-barbarous tuition which prevailed there, and possessed of a large fortune, he resolved to travel, if haply he might find in foreign universities a more rational system of knowledge, and purer models of study. He visited Italy, where he gave himself ardently in the acquisition of the tongue of ancient Rome, in company with Linacre, Grocyn, and William Lily, his countrymen, who had preceded him thither, drawn by their thirst for the new learning, especially the Greek. The change which the study of the classic writers had begun in Colet was completed by the reading of the Scriptures; and when he returned to England in 1497, the shackles of the schoolmen had been rent from his mind, and he was a discountenancer of the rites, the austerities, and the image-worship of the still dominant Church.[1] To the reading of the Scriptures he added the study of the Fathers, who furnished him with additional proofs and arguments against the prevailing doctrines and customs of the times, lie began a course of lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul in his cathedral church; and deeming his own labors all too little to dispel the thick night that brooded over the land, he summoned to his aid laborers whose minds, like his own, had been enlarged by the new learning, and especially by that diviner knowledge, to the fountains of which that learning had given them access. Those who had passed their studious hours together on the banks of the Arno, and under the delicious sky of Florence, became in London fellow-workmen in the attempt to overthrow the monkish system of tuition which had been pursued for ages, and to introduce their countrymen to true learning and sound knowledge. Colet employed William Grocyn to read lectures in St. Paul's on portions of Holy Scripture; and after Grocyn, he procured other learned men to read divinity lectures in his cathedral.[2]

But the special service of Colet was the founding of St. Paul's School, which he endowed out of his ample fortune, in order that sound learning might continue to be taught in it by duly qualified instructors. The first master of St. Paul's School was selected from the choice band of English scholars with whom Colet had formed so endearing a friendship in the capital of Tuscany. William Lily was appointed to preside over the newly-founded seminary, which had the honor of being the first public school in England, out of the universities, in which the Greek language was taught. This eminent scholar had been initiated into the beautiful language of ancient Greece at Rhodes, where he is said to have enjoyed for several years the instruction of one of the illustrious refugees whom the triumph of the Ottoman arms had chased from Constantinople. Cornelius Vitelli, an Italian, was the first who taught Greek in the University of Oxford. From him William Grocyn acquired the elements of that tongue, and, succeeding his master, he was the first Englishman who taught it at Oxford. His contemporary, Thomas Linacre, was not less distinguished as a "Grecian."

Linacre had spent some delightful years in Italy – the friend of Lorenzo de Medici, and the pupil of Politianus and Chalcondyles, at that time the most renowned classical teachers in Europe – and when afterwards he returned to his native land, he became successively physician to Arthur, Prince of Wales, and to Henry VIII. These men were scholars rather than Reformers, but the religious movement owed them much. Having caught on the soft of Virgil and Cicero an enthusiastic love of classic learning, they imbibed therewith that simplicity and freedom, that vigor and independence of thought which characterized the ancients, and they transplanted these great qualities into the soft of England. The teaching of the monks now began to offend the quickened intellect of the English people, and the scandalous lives of the clergy to revolt their moral sense. Thus the way was being paved for greater changes.

Colet, however, was more than the scholar; he attained the stature of a Reformer, though, the time not being ripe for separation from Rome, he lived and died within the pale of the Church. In a celebrated sermon which he preached before Convocation on Conformation and Reformation, he bewailed the unhappy condition of the Church as a flock deserted by its shepherds. The clergy he described as greedy of honors and riches, as having abandoned themselves to sensual delights, as spending their days in hunting and hawking, and their nights in feasting and revelry. Busied they truly were, but it was in the service of man; ambition they lacked not, but it rose no higher than the dignities of earth; their conversation was not in heaven, nor of heavenly things, but of the gossip of the court; and their dignity as God's ministers, which ought to transcend in brightness that of princes and emperors, was sorely bedimmed by the shadows of earth. And referring to the new doctrines which were beginning to be put forth in many quarters, "We see," said the dean, "strange and heretical opinions appearing in our days, and I wonder not; but has not St. Bernard told us that there is no heresy more dangerous to the Church than the vicious lives of its priests?" And coming in the close to the remedy, "The way," said he, "by which the Church may be reformed into a better fashion is not to make new laws – of these there are already enough – but to live new lives. With you, O Fathers and bishops, must begin the reformation so much needed; we, the priests, will follow when we see you going before, and then we need not fear that the whole body of the people will come after. Your holy lives will be as a book in which we shall read the Gospel, and be taught how to practice it; your example will be a sermon, and its sweet eloquence will be more effectual to draw the people into the right path than all the terror of cursings and excommunications."[3]

The people listened with delight to the Dean of St. Paul's; but not so the clergy. The times were too early, and the sermon too outspoken. Among Colet's auditors was the Bishop of London, Fitzjames. He was a man of eighty, of irritable temper, innocent of all theology save what he had learned from Thomas Aquinas, and he clung only the more tenaciously to the traditions of the past the older he grew. His ire being kindled, he went with a complaint against Color to Warham of Canterbury. "What has he said?" asked the archbishop. "Said!" exclaimed the aged and irate bishop, "what has he not said?" He has said that it is forbidden to worship by images; that it is lawful to say the Lord's Prayer in one's mother tongue; that the text, 'Feed my sheep,' does not impose temporal dues on the laity to the priest; and," added he, with some hesitation, "he has said that sermons in the pulpit ought not be read." Warham stuffed, for he himself was wont in preaching to read from his manuscript. To these weighty accusations, as Fitzjames doubtless accounted them, the dean had no defense to offer; and as little had the archbishop, an able and liberal-minded man, ecclesiastical censure to inflict. Another indication had been given how the tide was setting; and Dean Colet, feeling his position stronger, labored from that day more zealously than ever to dispel the darkness around him. It was after the delivery of this famous sermon that he resolved to devote his ample fortune to the diffusion of sound learning, knowing that ignorance was the nurse of the numerous superstitions that deformed his day, and the rampart around those monstrous evils he had so unsparingly reprobated.

Erasmus, the famous scholar of Holland, and More, the nearly as famous scholar of England, belong to the galaxy of learned men that constituted the English Renaissance. Both contributed aid to that literary movement which helped to fill, at this early hour, the skies of England with light. The service rendered by Erasmus to the Reformation is worthy of eternal remembrance. He it was who first opened to the learned men of Europe the portals of Divine Revelation, by his edition of the Greek New Testament, accompanied by a translation in Latin. It was published in 1516, and fracas a great epoch in the movement. Erasmus visited England, contracted a warm friendship with Colet, and learned from him to moderate his admiration of the great schoolman, Aquinas He was introduced at court, was caressed by Henry, and permitted to share in the munificence with which that monarch then patronized learned men. Erasmus could not endure the indolence, the greed, the gluttony, the crass ignorance of the monks, and he lashed them mercilessly with his keen wit and his pungent satire. The two great scholars, Erasmus and More, met for the first time at the table of the Lord Mayor of London. A short but brilliant encounter of wits revealed the one to the other. More was the Erasmus of England; the Utopia of the former answers to the Praise of Folly (Encomium Morice) of the latter. Possessing a playful fancy, a vigorous understanding, and a polished sarcasm, More delighted to assail with a delicate but effective raillery the same class of men against whom Erasmus had leveled his keenest shafts. He united with Erasmus in calling for a reformation of that Church of which, as says one, "he lived to be the champion, the inquisitor, and the martyr."[4] In his Utopia he shows us what sort of world he would fain have given us – a commonwealth in which there should be no place for monks, in which the number of priests should not exceed the number of churches, and in which the right of private judgment should be accorded to every one, and if any should think wrong, he was to be, put right by argument, and not by the rack or the faggot. Of great intellect, but not of equally great character, the two scholars had raised their voices, as we have said, for a reformation of abuses; but when they heard the voice of Luther resounding through Europe, and raising the same cry, and when they saw the reformation they had demanded at last approaching, they drew back in affright. They had failed to take account of the strength of error, and the forces necessary to uproot it; and when they saw altars overturned and thrones shaken – in short, a tempest arise that threatened to shake "not the earth only, but also heaven" – they resembled the magician who shudders at the spirit himself hath conjured up.

Such were the men and the agencies now at work in England. They were not the Reformation, but they were necessary preparatives of that great and much-needed change. The spiritual principles that Wicliffe had taught were still in the soft; but, like flowers in the time of winter, they had hidden themselves, and waited in the darkness the coming of a more mollient time to blossom forth. Letters might exist where they would not be suffered to live. But meanwhile the action of these principles was by no means suspended. Wicliffe's Bible was being disseminated among the people; the line of his disciples was perpetuated in the poor and despised Lollards: Protestant tracts were frequently arriving in the Thames from Germany: and here and there young priests and scholars were reading public lectures on portions of the Scriptures. In the political sphere, also, preparations were going forward. England had been overturned – the old tree had been cut down to its roots, as it were, in order that fresh and more friendly shoots might spring forth. The barons had fallen in the wars: the Plantagenets had disappeared from the throne: a Tudor was now swaying the scepter; inveterate customs and traditions were vanishing in the clear though chilly dawn of letters; and the plough of Reform, which had stood motionless in the furrow for well-nigh a century, was once more about to go forward.

CHAPTER 2 Back to Top

CARDINAL WOLSEY AND THE NEW TESTAMENT OF ERASMUS.

Arthur, Prince of Wales, Dies — Question of Henry's Marrying his Widow — Sentiments of the Primate — Dispensation of the Pope — Henry's Coronation and Marriage — Cardinal Wolsey — His Birth — Made King's Almoner — Made Archbishop of York — Cardinal — Chancellor — Legate-a-Latere — Rules the Kingdom Ecclesiastically and Civilly — His Grandeur — The Priests knew the War against Parliament — Are Worsted — Resume their Persecution of Heretics — Story of Richard Hun — His Murder — Burning of his Bones — Martyrdom of John Brown — Erasmus Driven out of England — Prints his Greek and Latin New Testament — Its Enthusiastic Reception in England — England's Reformation eminently Biblical — England constituted the Custodian and Dispenser of the Bible.

HENRY VIII again appears on the stage. We find him still the idol of the people; his court continues to be the resort of scholars; and the enormous wealth left him by his father enables him still to extend his munificent patronage to learning, and at the same time provide those shows, tournaments, and banquets, which made his court one of the gayest in all Europe. Nothing, at this hour, was less likely than that this prince should separate himself from the communion of the Roman Church, and withdraw his kingdom from obedience to the Pontifical jurisdiction. He had been educated for the priesthood until the death of Prince Arthur, his elder brother; and though this event placed a crown instead of a mitre upon his head, it left him still so much the churchman that he plumed himself upon his theological lore, and was ever ready to do battle for a hierarchy in whose ranks he had looked forward to being enrolled, and at whose altars he had hoped to spend his life. A disciple of Thomas Aquinas, the subtlest intellect of the thirteenth century, and the man who had done more than any other doctor of the Middle Ages to fortify the basis of the Papal supremacy, Henry was not likely to be wanting in reverence for the See of Rome. Indeed, in one well-known instance he had shown abundance of zeal in the Pope's behalf: we refer to his book against Luther, fro which the conclave at Rome voted him the title of "Defender of the Faith." But the train for the opposition he was to show, not to the doctrine of the Papacy, but to its jurisdiction, was laid nearly twenty years before; and it is instructive to mark that it was laid in an act of submission to that very jurisdiction, against which Henry was fated at a future day to rebel.

Arthur, Prince of Wales, was realized during his father's lifetime to Catherine, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. The bride of the young prince, who was a year older than her husband, was the wealthiest heiress in Europe, and her dowry had been a prime consideration with Henry VII in promoting the match. About five months after the marriage, Prince Arthur fell ill and died (2nd April, 1502), at the age of sixteen. When a few months had passed, and it was seen that no issue was to be expected from Arthur's marriage, Prince Henry was proclaimed heir to the throne, and Catherine was about to return to Spain. But the parsimonious Henry VII, grieved to think that her dowry of 200,000 ducats [1] should have to be sent back with her, to become, it might be, the possession of a scion of some other royal house, started the proposal that Henry should marry his deceased brother's widow.

To this proposal Ferdinand of Spain gave his consent. Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, opposed it. "It is declared in the law of God," said the primate, "that if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean thing: they shall be childless."(Leviticus 20:21.) Fox, Bishop of Winchester, hinted that the difficulty might be got over by a dispensation from the Pope. The warlike Julius II was then reigning; he thought more of battles than of the Mosaic code, said on being applied to, he readily granted the dispensation sought. In December, 1503, a bull was issued, authorizing Catherine's marriage with the brother of her first husband. This was followed by the betrothal of the parties, but not as yet by their marriage, the Prince of Wales being then only twelve years of age.[2]

The interval gave the old king time for reflection. He began strongly to suspect that the proposed marriage, the Pope's bull notwithstanding, was contrary to the law of God; and calling Prince Henry, now fourteen years of age, to him, he caused him to sign a protest, duly authenticated, against the consummation of the marriage.[3] And when four years afterwards he lay on his death-bed, he again summoned the prince to his presence, and conjured him not to marry her who had been the wife of his brother.[4] On the 9th of May, 1509, Henry VII was borne to the tomb; and no sooner had the coffin been lowered into the vault, and the staves of the officers of state, who stood around the grave, broken and cast in after it, than the heralds proclaimed, with flourish of trumpets, King Henry VIII. Henry could now do as he liked in the matter of the marriage. Meanwhile the amiable disposition and irreproachable virtue of Catherine had conciliated the nation, which at first had asked, "Can the Pope repeal the laws of God?" and when on the 24th of June Henry was crowned in Westminster, there sat by his side Catherine, as his bride and queen. Henry thus began his reign with an act of submission to the Papal authority; for in accepting his brothers widow as his wife, he accepted the Pope's dispensation as valid; and the Pontiff, on his part, rejoiced in what had taken place, as a new pledge of obedience to the Roman See on the part of England and her sovereign, seeing that with the validity of his bull was now clearly bound up the legitimacy of the future princes of the realm. The two must stand or fall together; for if his bull was naught, so too was their title to the crown.

Years passed away without anything remarkable taking place in the domestic life of Henry and Catherine. These years were spent in jousts and costly entertainments; in the society of scholars and the patronage of learning; in a military raid into France, chiefly at the instigation of Julius II, who, himself much occupied on the battle-field, delighted to see his brother-sovereigns similarly engaged, well knowing that their rivalries kept them weak, and that their weakness was his strength. One thing only saddened the king and queen: it seemed as if the woe denounced against him who marries his brother's widow, "he shall be childless," were taking effect. Henry's male progeny all died. Catherine bore him three sons and two daughters; but "Henry beheld his sons just show themselves and then sink into the tomb."[5] Of all the children of Catherine, Lady Mary alone, born in 1515, survived the period of infancy. Doubts touching the lawfulness of his marriage began to spring up in the king's mind; but before seeing into what these scruples ripened, it is necessary to attend to another personage who now stepped upon the stage, and who was destined to act a great part in the events which were about to engage the attention, not of England only, but of Christendom.

From the lowest ranks there now sprang up a man of vast ambition and equal talent, who speedily rose to the highest posts in the State, and the most splendid dignities of the Church, and who, by his grandeur and munificence, illustrated once more before the eyes of the English people, the glory of the Church of Rome before it should finally sink and disappear. His name was Thomas Wolsey — by far the most famous of all those Englishmen who have borne the title of Cardinal. A few sentences will enable us to trace the rapid rise of this man to that blaze of power in which, for a season, he shone, only to fall as suddenly and portentously as he had risen. Wolsey (born 1471) was the son of a butcher at Ipswich, and after studying at Magdalen College, Oxford, he passed into the family of the Marquis of Dorset, as tutor.[6] Fox, Bishop of Winchester, Keeper of the Privy Seal, finding himself eclipsed by the Earl of Surrey in the graces of Henry VII, looked about him for one to counterbalance his rival; and deeming that he had found a suitable instrument in Wolsey, drew him from an obscure sphere in the country, and found a place for him at court as almoner to the king. Wolsey ingratiated himself into that monarch's favor, by executing successfully a secret negotiation at Brussels, with such dispatch that he returned before he had had time, as Henry thought, to set out. His advancement from that moment would have been rapid but for the death of the king, which happened not long afterwards. Under the young Henry, Wolsey played his part not less adroitly. His versatility developed more freely, in the warm air of Henry VIII's court, than it had done in the cold atmosphere of that of his predecessor. Business or pleasure came alike to Wolsey. He could be as gay as the gayest of the king's courtiers, and as wise and grave as the most staid of his councilors. He could retail, for the monarch's amusement, the gossip of the court, and the town, or edify him by quoting the sayings of some mediaeval doctor, and especially his favorite, the angelic Aquinas. Wolsey was no ascetic; in his presence Vice never hung her head, and he never forbade in his sovereign those liaisons in which, unless public report hugely calumniated him, he himself freely indulged. Royal favors fell thick and fast on the clever and most accommodating churchman. The mitres of Tournay, Lincoln, and York were in one year placed on his head. But Wolsey was one of those who think that nothing has been gained unless all has been won. He refused to lower the cross of York to the cross of Canterbury, thus claiming for himself equality with the primate; and when this was denied him, he reached his end by another road. He solicited, through Francis I, the Roman purple, and in this too he succeeded. In November, 1515, an envoy from Rome arrived in England, bringing to the cardinal his "red hat" — that gift which has ever in the end wrought evil to the wearer, as well as to the realm; converting, as it does, its owner into the satrap of a foreign Power.

Wolsey was not yet satisfied: there was something higher still, and he must continue to climb. The pious Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, wearying of contending with the butcher's son, who had clothed his person in Roman purple, and his mind in more than Roman pride, now resigned the seals as Chancellor of the Kingdom, and the king put them into the hands of Wolsey.[7] He was now near the summit: one more effort and he would reach it: at last it was gained. There came a bull appointing him the Cardinal Legate-a-Latere of "Holy Church." This placed him a little, and only a little, below the Papal throne itself. To it Wolsey began to lift his eyes, as the only one of earth's grandeurs now above him; but meanwhile the pursuit of this dazzling prize was delayed, and he gave himself to the consolidation of those manifold powers which he wielded in England. His jurisdiction was immense. All church courts, all bishops and priests, the primate himself, all colleges and monasteries, were under him.

All causes in which the Church was interested, however remotely, were adjudicated by him. He decided in all matters of conscience, in wills and testaments, in marriages and divorces, and in those actions which, though they might not be punishable by the law, were censurable by the Church as violations of good morals. From his sentences there was no appeal to the king's tribunals. The throne and Parliament must submit to have their prerogatives, laws, and jurisdiction circumscribed and regulated by the cardinal, as the representative of God's Vicar in England. Those causes which were excluded from his jurisdiction as Legate-a-Latere, came under his cognizance as Chancellor of the Kingdom, so that Wolsey really governed both Church and State. He was virtually king, and his own famous phrase, Ego et Rex meus — "I and my king" — was not less in accordance with fact than it was with the idiom of the language in which it was expressed.

Of the grandeurs of his palace, the sumptuousness of his table, the number of his daily guests, and the multitude of his servants, it is needless to speak. The list of his domestics was upwards of 500, and some of the nobles of England did not account it beneath them to be enrolled in the number. When he moved out of doors he wore a dress of crimson velvet and silk; his shoes glittered with jewels; the goodliest priests of the realm marched before him, carrying silver crosses, while his pomp was swelled by a retinue of becoming length. When Wolsey said mass, it was after the manner of the Pope himself; bishops and abbots aided him in the function, and some of the first nobility gave him water and the towel.[8]

But with his pomps, pleasures, and hospitalities he mingled manifold labors. His capacity was great, and seemed to enlarge with the elevation of his rank and the increase of his offices. His two redeeming qualities were the patronage of learning and the administration of justice. His decisions in Chancery were impartial and equitable, and his enormous wealth, gathered from innumerable sources, enabled him to surround himself with scholars, and to found institutions of learning, for which lie had his reward in the praises of the former, and the posthumous glory of the latter. Nevertheless he did not succeed in making himself popular. His haughty deportment offended the people, who knew him to be hollow, selfish, and vicious, despite his grand masses and his ostentatious beneficence.

The rise at this hour of such a man, who had gathered into his single hand all the powers of the State, seemed of evil augury for the Reformation. Rome, in all her dominancy, was in him rising up again in England. The priests were emboldened to declare war, first against the scholars by sounding the alarm against Greek, which they stigmatized as a main source of heresy, and next against Parliament by demanding back the immunities of which they had been stripped during preceding reigns. In addition to former losses of prerogative, the priests were threatened with a new encroachment on their privileges. In 1513 a law was passed, ordering ecclesiastics who should commit murder or theft to be tried in the secular courts — bishops, priests, and deacons excepted. It was discovered that though the Pope could dispense with the laws of God, the Parliament could not. The Abbot of Winchelcomb, preaching at St. Paul's, gave the signal for battle, exclaiming, "'Touch not mine anointed,' said the Lord."

Thereafter a clerical deputation, headed by Wolsey, proceeded to the palace to demand that the impious law should be annulled. "Sire," said the cardinal, "to try a clerk is a violation of God's laws." "By God's will we are King of England," replied Henry, who saw that to put the clergy above the Parliament was to put them above himself, "and the Kings in England, in times past, had never any superior but God only. Therefore know you well that we will maintain the right of our crown."

Baffled in their attack on Parliament, the priests vented their fury upon others. There were still many Lollards who, although living in the bosom of the Roman Church, gave the priests much disquiet. One of these was Richard Hun, a tradesman in London, who spent a portion of each day in the study of the Bible. He was summoned before the legate's court on the charge of refusing to pay a fee imposed by a priest, which he deemed exorbitant. Indignant at being made answerable before a foreign court, Hun lodged an accusation against the priest under the Act Praemunire.[9] "Such boldness must be severely checked," said the clergy, "otherwise not a citizen but will set the Church at defiance." Hun was accused of heresy, consigned to the Lollards' Tower in St. Paul's, and left there in irons, chained so heavily that his fetters hardly permitted him to drag his steps across the floor. On his trial no such proof of heresy was produced as would suffice for his condemnation, and his persecutors found themselves in a greater dilemma than before, for to set him at liberty would proclaim their defeat. Three of their fanatical agents undertook to extricate them from their difficulties. Climbing to his cell at midnight (3rd December, 1514), and dragging Hun out of bed, they first strangled him, and then putting his own belt round his neck, they suspended the body by an iron ring in the wall, to make believe that he had hanged himself.[10]

A great horror straightway fell upon two of the perpetrators of the deed, so that they fled, and thus revealed the crime. "The priests have murdered Hun," was the cry in London; and the fact being amply attested at the inquest, as well as by the confession of the murderers, the priests were harder put to than ever, and had recourse to the following notable device: — They examined the Bible which Hun had been wont to read, and found it was Wicliffe's translation. This was enough. Certain articles of indictment were drafted against Hun; a solemn session of Fitzjames, Bishop of London, with certain assessors, was held, and sentence was pronounced, finding Hun guilty and condemning his dead body to be burned as that of a heretic. His corpse was dug up and burned in Smithfield on the 20th of December. "The bones of Richard Hun have been burned," argued the priests, "therefore he was a heretic; he was a heretic, therefore he committed suicide." The Parliament, however, not seeing the force of this syllogism, found that Hun had died by the hands of others, and ordained restitution of his goods to be made to his family. The Bishop of London, through Wolsey, had influence enough to prevent the punishment of the murderers.[11]

There was quite a little cloud of sufferers and martyrs in London, from the accession of Henry VIII to 1517, the era of Luther's appearance. Their knowledge was imperfect, some only had courage to witness unto the death, but we behold in them proofs that the Spirit of God was returning to the world, and that he was opening the eyes of not a few to see in the midst of the great darkness the errors of Rome. The doctrine about which they were generally incriminated was that of transubstantiation. Among other tales of persecution furnished by the times, that of John Brown, of Ashford, has been most touchingly told by the English martyrologist. Brown happened to seat himself beside a priest in the Gravesend barge. "After certain communication, the priest asked him," says Fox, "'Dost thou know who I am?

Thou sittest too near me: thou sittest on my clothes.' 'No, sir,' said Brown; 'I know not what you are.' 'I tell thee I am a priest.' 'What, sir, are you a parson, or vicar, or a lady's chaplain?' 'No,' quoth he again; 'I am a soul-priest, I sing for a soul,' saith he. 'Do you so, sir?' quoth the other; 'that is well done.' 'I pray you sir,' quoth he, 'where find you the soul when you go to mass?' 'I cannot tell thee,' said the priest. 'I pray you, where do you leave it, sir, when the mass is done ?' 'I cannot tell thee,' said the priest. ' You can neither tell me where you find it when you go to mass, nor where you leave it when the mass is done: how can you then have the soul?' said he. 'Go thy ways,' said the priest; 'thou art a heretic, and I will be even with thee.' So at the landing the priest, taking with him Walter More and William More, two gentlemen, brethren, rode straightway to the Archbishop Warham."

Three days thereafter, as Brown sat at dinner with some guests, the officers entered, and dragging him from the house, they mounted him upon a horse, and tying his feet under the animals belly, rode away. His wife and family knew not for forty days where he was or what had been done to him. It was the Friday before Whit-Sunday. The servant of the family, having had occasion to go out, hastily returned, and rushed into the house exclaiming, "I have seen him! I have seen him!" Brown had that day been taken out of prison at Canterbury, brought back to Ashford, and placed in the stocks. His poor wife went forth, and sat down by the side of her husband. So tightly was he bound in the stocks, that he could hardly turn his head to speak to his wife, who sat by him bathed in tears. He told her that he had been examined by torture, that his feet had been placed on live coals, and burned to the bones, "to make me," said he, "deny my Lord, which I will never do; for should I deny my Lord in this world, he would hereafter deny me. I pray thee, therefore," said he, "good Elizabeth, continue as thou hast begun, and bring up thy children virtuously, and in the fear of God." On the next day, being Whir-Sunday, he was taken out of the stocks and bound to the stake, where he was burned alive. His wife, his daughter Alice, and his other children, with some friends, gathered round the pile to receive his last words. He stood with invincible courage amid the flames. He sang a hymn of his own composing; and feeling that now the fire had nearly done its work, he breathed out the prayer offered by the great Martyr: "Into thy hands I commend my spirit; thou hast redeemed me, O Lord of truth," and so he ended.[12] Shrieks of anguish rose from his wife and daughter. The spectators, moved with compassion, regarded them with looks of pity; but, turning to the executioners, they cast on them a scowl of anger. "Come," said Chilton, a brutal ruffian who had presided at the dreadful tragedy, and who rightly interpreted the feeling of the bystanders — "Come, let us cast the children into the fire, lest they, too, one day become heretics." So saying, he rushed towards Alice and attempted to lay hold upon her; but the maiden started back:, and avoided the villain.[13]

Next to the heretics, the priests dreaded the scholars. Their instincts taught them that the new learning boded no good to their system. Of all the learned men now in England the one whom they hated most was Erasmus, and with just reason. He stood confessedly at the head of the scholars, whether in England or on the Continent. He had great influence at court; he wielded a pungent wit, as they had occasion daily to experience — in short, he must be expelled the kingdom. But Erasmus resolved to take ample compensation from those who had driven him out. He went straight to Basle, and establishing himself at the printing-press of Frobenius, issued his Greek and Latin New Testament. The world now possessed for the first time a printed copy in the original Greek of the New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It was the result of combined labor and scholarship; the Greek was beautifully pure; the Latin had been purged from the barbarisms of the Vulgate, and far excelled it in elegance and clearness. Copies were straightway dispatched to London, Oxford, and Cambridge. It was Erasmus' gift to England — to Christendom, doubtless, but especially England; and in giving the country this gift he gave it more than if he had added the most magnificent empire to its dominion.

The light of the English Renaissance was now succeeded by the light of the English Reformation. The monks had thought to restore the darkness by driving away the great scholar: his departure was the signal for the rising on the realm of a light which made what had been before it seem but as twilight. The New Testament of Erasmus was hailed with enthusiasm. Everywhere it was sought after and read, by the first scholars in Greek, by the great body of the learned in Latin. The excitement it caused in England was something like that which Luther's appearance produced in Germany. The monk of Saxony had not yet posted up his Theses, when the Oracles of Truth were published in England. "The Reformation of England," says a modern historian, who of all others evinces the deepest insight into history — "The Reformation of England, perhaps to a greater extent than that of the Continent, was effected by the Word of God."[14]

To Germany, Luther was sent; Geneva and France had Calvin given to them; but England received a yet greater Reformer — the Bible. Its Reformation was more immediate and direct, no great individuality being interposed between it and the source of Divine knowledge. Luther had given to Germany his Theses; Calvin had given to France the Institutes; but to England was given the Word of God. Within the sea-girt isle, in prospect of the storms that were to devastate the outer world, was placed this Divine Light — the World's Lamp — surely a blessed augury of what England's function was to be in days to come. The country into whose hands was now placed the Word of God, was by this gift publicly constituted its custodian. Freely had she received the Scriptures, freely was she to give them to the nations around her. She was first to make them the Instructor of her people; she was next to enshrine them as a perpetual lamp in her Church. Having made them the foundation-stone of her State, she was finally to put them into the hands of all the nations of the earth, that they too might be guided to Truth, Order, and Happiness.

CHAPTER 3 Back to Top

WILLIAM TYNDALE AND THE ENGLISH NEW TESTAMENT.

Bilney — Reads the New Testament — Is Converted by it — Tyndale — His Conversion — Fryth — All Three Emancipated by the Bible — Foundations of England's Reformation — Tyndale at Sodbury Hall — Disputations with the Priests — Preaches at Bristol — Resolves to Translate the Scriptures — Goes to London — Applies to Tonstall — Received into Humphrey Monmouth's House — Begins his Translation of the New Testament — Escapes to Germany — Leo's Bull against Luther Published in England — Henry's Book against Luther — Wolsey Intrigues for the Popedom — His Disappointment — Tyndale in Hamburg — William Roye — Begins Printing the English New Testament in Cologne — Finishes in Worms — Sends it across the Sea to England.

ERASMUS had laid his New Testament at the feet of England. In so doing he had sent to that country, as he believed, a message of peace; great was his astonishment to find that he had but blown a trumpet of war, and that the roar of battle was louder than ever. The services of the great scholar to the Reformation were finished, and now he retired. But the Bible remained in England, and wherever the Word of God went, there came Protestantism also.

There was at Trinity College, Cambridge, a young student of the canon law, Thomas Bilney by name, of small stature, delicate constitution, and much occupied with the thoughts of eternity. He had striven to attain to the assurance of the life eternal by a constant adherence to the path of virtue, nevertheless his conscience, which was very tender, reproached him with innumerable shortcomings. Vigils, penances, masses — all, in short, which the "Church" prescribes for the relief of burdened souls, he had tried, but with no effect save that he had wasted his body and spent nearly all his means. He heard his friends one day speak of the New Testament of Erasmus, and he made haste to procure a copy, moved rather by the pleasure which he anticipated from the purity of its Greek and the elegance of its Latin, than the hope of deriving any higher good from it. He opened the book. His eyes fell on these words: "This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief." "The chief of sinners," said he to himself, musing over what he had read: "Paul the chief of sinners! and yet Christ came to save him! then why not me?" "He had found," says Fox, "a better teacher" than the doctors of the canon law — "the Holy Spirit of Christ."[1] That hour he quitted the road of self-righteous performances, by which he now saw he had been travelling, :in pain of body and sorrow of soul, and he entered into life by Him who is the door. This was the beginning of the triumphs of the New Testament at Cambridge. How fruitful this one victory was, we shall afterwards see.

We turn to Oxford. There was at this university a student from the valley of the Severn, a descendant of an ancient family, William Tyndale by name. Nowhere had Erasmus so many friends as at Oxford, and nowhere did his New Testament receive a more cordial welcome. Our young student, "of most virtuous disposition, and life unspotted,"[2] was drawn to the study of the book, fascinated by the elegance of its style and the sublimity of its teaching. He soon came to be aware of some marvelous power in it, which lie had found in no other book he had ever studied. Others had invigorated his intellect, this regenerated his heart. He had discovered an inestimable treasure, and he would not hide it. This pure youth began to give public lectures on this pure book; but this being more than Oxford could yet bear, the young Tyndale quitted the banks of the His, and joined Bilney at Cambridge.

These two were joined by a third, a young man of blameless life and elevated soul. John Fryth, the son of an inn-keeper at Sevenoaks, Kent, was possessed of marvelously quick parts; and with a diligence and a delight in learning equal to his genius, he would have opened for himself, says Fox, "an easy road to honors and dignities, had he not wholly consecrated himself to the service of the Church of Christ."[3] It was William Tyndale who first sowed "in his heart the seed of the Gospel."[4]

These three young students were perfectly emancipated from the yoke of the Papacy, and their emancipation had been accomplished by the Word of God alone. No infallible Church had interpreted that book to them. They read their Bibles with prayer to the Spirit, and as they read the eyes of their understanding were opened, and the wonders of God's law were revealed to them. They came to see that it was faith that unlocked all the blessings of salvation: that it was faith, and not the priest, that united them to Christ — Christ, whose cross, and not the Church, was the source of forgiveness; whose Spirit, and not the Sacrament, was the author of holiness; and whose righteousness alone, and not the merits of men either dead or living, was the foundation of the sinner's justification. These views they had not received from Wittemberg; for Luther was only then beginning his career: their knowledge of Divine things they had received from the Bible, and from the Bible alone; and they laid the foundations of the Protestant Church of England, or rather dug down through the rubbish of ages, to the foundations which had been laid of old time by the first missionaries to Britain.

Henry VIII was aspiring to become emperor; Wolsey was beginning to intrigue for the tiara; but it is the path of Tyndale that we are to follow, more glorious than that of the other two, though it seemed not so to the world. Having completed his studies at Cambridge, Tyndale came back to his native Gloucestershire, and became tutor in the family of Sir John Walsh, of Sodbury Hall. At the table of his patron he met daily the clergy of the neighborhood, "abbots, deans, archdeacons, with divers other doctors, and great beneficed men."[5] In the conversations that ensued the name of Luther, who was then beginning to be heard of, was often mentioned, and from the man the transition was easy to his opinions. The young student from Cambridge did not conceal his sympathy with the German monk, and kept his Greek New Testament ever beside him to support his sentiments, which startled one half of those around the table, and scandalized the other half. The disputants often grew warm. "That is the book that makes heretics," said the priests, glancing at the unwelcome volume. "The source of all heresies is pride," would the humble tutor reply to the lordly clergy of the rich valley of the Severn. "The vulgar cannot understand the Word of God," said the priests; "it is the Church Sat gave the Bible to men, and it is only her priests that can interpret it." "Do you know who taught the eagles to find their prey?" asked Tyndale; "that same God teaches his children to find their Father in his Word. Far from having given us the Scriptures, it; is you who have hidden them from us."

The cry of heresy was raised against the tutor; and the lower clergy, restoring to the ale-house, harangued those whom they found assembled there, violently declaiming against the errors of Tyndale.[6] A secret accusation was laid against him before the bishop's chancellor, but Tyndale defended himself so admirably that he escaped out of the hands of his enemies. He now began to explain the Scrip-tares on Sundays to Sir John and his household and tenantry. He next extended his labors to the neighboring villages, scattering with his living voice that precious seed to which as yet the people had no access, in their mother tongue, in a printed form. He extended his preaching tours to Bristol, and its citizens assembled to hear him in St. Austin's Green.[7] But no sooner had he sowed the seed than the priests hastened to destroy it; and when Tyndale returned he found that his labor had been in vain: the field was ravaged. "Oh," said he, "if the people of England had the Word of God in their own language this would not happen. Without this it will be impossible to establish the laity in the truth."

It was now that the sublime idea entered his mind of translating and printing the Scriptures. The prophets spoke in the language of the men whom they addressed; the songs of the temple were uttered in the vernacular of the Hebrew nation; and the epistles of the New Testament were written in the tongue of those to whom they were sent; and why, asked Tyndale, should not the people of England have the Oracles of God in their mother tongue? "If God spare my life," said he, "I will, before many years have passed, cause the boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scriptures than the priests do."[8]

But it was plain that Tyndale could not accomplish what he now proposed should be his life's work at Sodbury Hall: the hostility of the priests was too strongly excited to leave him in quiet. Bidding Sir John's family adieu he repaired (1523) to the metropolis. He had hoped to find admission into the household of Tonstall, Bishop of London, whose learning Erasmus had lauded to the skies, and at whose door, coming as he did on a learned and pious errand, the young scholar persuaded himself he should find an instant and cordial welcome. A friend, to whom he had brought letters of recommendation from Sir John, mentioned his name to Bishop Tonstall; he even obtained an audience of the bishop, but only to have his hopes dashed. "My house is already full," said the bishop coldly. He turned away: there was no room for him in the Episcopal palace to translate the Scriptures. But if the doors of the bishop's palace were closed against him, the door of a rich London merchant was now opened for his reception, in the following manner.

Soon after his arrival in the metropolis, Tyndale began to preach in public: among his hearers was one Humphrey Monmouth, who had learned to love the Gospel from listening to Dean Colet. When repulsed by Tonstall, Tyndale told Monmouth of his disappointment. "Come and live with me," said the wealthy merchant, who was ever ready to show hospitality to poor disciples for the Gospel's sake. He took up his abode in Monmouth's house; he lived abstemiously [9] at a table loaded with delicacies; and he studied night and day, being intent on kindling a torch that should illuminate England. Eager to finish, he summoned Fryth to his aid; and the two friends working together, chapter after chapter of the New Testament passed from the Greek into the tongue of England. The two scholars had been a full half-year engaged in their work, when the storm of persecution broke out afresh in London. Inquisition was made for all who had any of Luther's works in their possession, the readers of which were threatened with the fire. "If," said Tyndale, "to possess the works of Luther exposes one to a stake, how much greater must be the crime of translating the Scriptures!" His friends urged him to withdraw, as the only chance left him of ever accomplishing the work to which he had devoted himself. Tyndale had no alternative but to adopt with a heavy heart the course his friends recommended. "I understood at the last," said he, "not only that there was no room in my lord of London's palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England."[10] Stepping on board a vessel in the Thames that was loading for Hamburg, and taking with him his Greek New Testament, he sailed for Germany.

While Tyndale is crossing the sea, we must give attention to other matters which meanwhile had been transpiring in England. The writings of Luther had by this time entered the kingdom and were being widely circulated. The eloquence of his words, fitly sustained by the heroism of his deeds, roused t]he attention of the English people, who watched the career of the monk with the deepest interest. His noble stand before the Diet at Worms crowned the interest his first appearance had awakened. As when fresh oil is poured into the dying lamp, the spirit of Lollardism revived. It leaped up in new breadth and splendor. The bishops took the alarm, and held a council to deliberate on the measures to be taken. The bull of Leo [11] against Luther had been sent to England, and it was resolved to publish it. The Cardinal-legate Wolsey, following at no humble distance Pope Leo, also issued a bull of his own against Luther, and both were published in all the cathedral and parish churches of England on the first Sunday of June, 1521. The bull of Wolsey was read during high mass, and that of Leo was nailed up on the church door. The principal result of this proceeding was to advertise the writings of Luther to the people of England. The car of Reformation was advancing; the priests had taken counsel to stop it, but the only effect of their interference was to make it move onwards at an accelerated speed.

At this stage of the controversy an altogether unexpected champion stepped into the arena to do battle with Luther. This was no less a personage than the King of England. The zeal which animated Henry for the Roman traditions, and the fury wit]h which he was transported against the man who was uprooting them, may be judged of from the letter he addressed to Louis of Bavaria. "That this fire," said he, "which has been kindled by Luther, and fanned by the arts of the devil, should have raged for so long a time, and be still gathering strength, has been the subject to me of greater grief than tongue or pen can express…. For what could have happened more calamitous to Germany than that she should have given birth to a man who has dared to interpret the Divine law, the statutes of the Fathers, and those decrees which have received the consent of so many ages, in a manner totally at variance with the opinion of the learned Fathers of the Church…. We earnestly implore and exhort you that you delay not a moment to seize and exterminate this Luther, who is a rebel against Christ; and, unless he repents, deliver himself and his audacious writings to the flames."[12]

This shows us the fate that would probably have awaited Luther had he lived in England: happily his lot had been cast under a more benignant and gracious sovereign. But Henry, debarred in this case the use of the stake, which would speedily have consumed the heretic, if not the heresy, made haste to unsheathe the controversial sword. He attacked Luther's Babylonian Captivity in a work entitled A Defense of the Seven Sacraments. The king's book discovers an intimate acquaintance with mediaeval and scholastic inventions and decrees, but no knowledge whatever of apostolic doctrine. Luther ascribed it to Lee, afterwards Archbishop of York; others have thought that they could trace in it the hand of Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. But we see no reason to ascribe it to any one save Henry himself. He was an apt scholar of Thomas Aquinas, and here he discusses those questions only which had come within the range of his previous studies.[13] He dedicated the work to the Pontiff, and sent a splendidly bound copy of it to Leo. It was received at Rome in the manner that we should expect the work of a king, written in defense of the Papal chair, to be received by a Pope. Leo eulogized it as the crowning one among the glories of England, and he rewarded the messenger, who had carried it across the Alps, by giving him his toe to kiss; and recompensed Henry for the labor he had incurred in writing it, by bestowing upon him (1521) the title of "Defender of the Faith," which was confirmed by a bull of Clement VII in 1523. [14]"We can do nothing against the truth, but for it," wrote an apostle, and his words were destined to be signally verified in the case of the King of England. Henry set up Tradition and the Supremacy as the main buttresses of the Papal system. The nation was wearying of both; the king's defense but showed the Protestants where to direct their assault; and as for the applauses from the Vatican, so agreeable to the royal ear, these were speedily drowned ha the thunders of Luther; and most people came to see, though all did not acknowledge it, that if Henry the king was above the monk, Henry the author was below him.

Wolsey now turned his face toward the Popedom. If he had succeeded in achieving this, which was the summit of his ambition, he would have attempted to revive the glories of the era of Innocent III: its substantial power he never could have wielded, for the wars of the fifteenth century, by putting the kings above the Popes, had made that impossible. Still, as Pope, Wolsey would have been a more formidable opponent of the Reformation than either Leo or Clement. It was clear that he could reach the dignity to which he aspired only by the help of one or other of the two great Continental sovereigns of his time, Francis I and Charles V He was on the most friendly footing with Francis, whereas he had contracted a strong dislike to Charles, and the emperor was well aware that the cardinal loved him not. Still, on weighing the matter, Wolsey saw that of the two sovereigns Charles was the abler to assist him; so breaking with Francis, and smothering his disgust of the emperor, he solicited his interest to secure the tiara for him when it should become vacant. That monarch, who could dissemble as well as Wolsey, well knowing the influence of the cardinal with Henry VIII, and his power in England, met this request with promises and flatteries. Charles thought he was safe in Promising the tiara to one who was some years older than its present possessor, for Leo was still in the prime of life. The immediate result of this friendship, hollow on both sides, was a war between Francis and the emperor. Meanwhile Leo suddenly died, and the sincerity of Charles, sooner than he had thought, was put to the test. With no small chagrin and mortification, which he judged it politic meanwhile to conceal, Wolsey saw Adrian of Utrecht, the emperor's tutor, placed in the Papal chair. But Adrian was an old man; it was not probable that he would long survive to sway the spiritual scepter of Christendom, and Charles consoled the disappointed cardinal by renewing his promise of support when a new election, which could not be distant, should take place.[15] But we must leave the cardinal, his eyes still fixed on the dazzling prize, and follow the track of one who also was aspiring to a crown, but one more truly glorious than that of Pope or emperor.

We have seen Tyndale set sail for Germany. Arriving at Hamburg, he unpacked the MS. sheets which he had first begun in the valley of the Severn, and resumed on the banks of the Elbe the prosecution of his great design. William Rove, formerly a Franciscan friar at Greenwich, but who had abandoned the cloister, became his assistant. The Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark were translated and printed at Hamburg, and in 1524 were sent across to Monmouth in London, as the first-fruits of his great task. The merchant sent the translator a much-needed supply of money, which enabled Tyndale to pay a visit to Luther in Wittemberg, whence he returned, and established himself at the printing-house of Quentel and Byrckman ha Cologne. Resuming his great labor, he began to print an edition of 3,000 copies of his English New Testament. Sheet after sheet was passing through the press. Great was Tyndale's joy. He had taken every precaution, meanwhile, against a seizure, knowing this archiepiscopal seat to be vigorously watched by a numerous and jealous priesthood. The tenth sheet was ha the press when Byrckman, hurrying to him, informed him that the Senate had ordered the printing of the work to be stopped. All was discovered then! Tyndale was stunned. Must the labor of years be lost, and the enlightenment of England, which had seemed so near, be frustrated? His resolution was taken on the spot. Going straight to the printing-house, he packed up the printed sheets, and bidding Roye follow, he stepped into a boat on the Rhine and ascended the river. It was Cochlaeus who had come upon the track of the English New Testament, and hardly was Tyndale gone when the officers from the Senate, led by the dean, entered the printing-house to seize the work.[16]

After some days Tyndale arrived at Worms, that little town which Luther's visit, four years before, had invested with a halo of historic glory. On his way thither he thought less, doubtless, of the picturesque hills that enclose the "milk-white" river, with the ruined castles that crown their summits, and the antique towns that nestle at their feet, than of the precious wares embarked with him. These to his delight he safely conveyed to the printing-house of Peter Schaefer, the grandson of Fust, one of the inventors of the art. He instantly resumed the printing, but to mislead the spies, who, he thought it probable, would follow him hither, he changed the form of the work from the quarto to the octavo, which was an advantage in the end, as it greatly facilitated the circulation.[17]

The printing of the two editions was completed in the end of 1525, and soon thereafter 1,500 copies were dispatched to England. "Give diligence" — so ran the solemn charge that accompanied them, to the nation to which the waves were wafting the precious pages — "unto the words of eternal life, by the which, if we repent and believe them, we are born anew, created afresh, and enjoy the fruits of the blood of Christ." Tyndale had done his great work. While Wolsey, seated in the splendid halls of his palace at Westminster, had been intriguing for the tiara, that he might conserve the darkness that covered England, Tyndale, in obscure lodgings in the German and Flemish towns, had been toiling night and day, in cold and hunger, to kindle a torch that might illuminate it.

CHAPTER 4 Back to Top

TYNDALE'S NEW TESTAMENT ARRIVES IN ENGLAND.

Bilney's Labors at Cambridge — Hugh Latimer — His Education — Monkish Asceticism — Bilney's Device — Latimer's Conversion — Power of his Preaching — Wolsey's College — The Bishops try to Arrest the Evangelization — Prior Buckingham — Bishop of Ely and Latimer — Dr. Barnes and the Augustine Convent — Workers at Cambridge — Excitement at Cambridge and Oxford — Desire for the Word of God — Tyndale's New Testament Arrives in London — Distributed by Garret in the City — in Oxford — over the Kingdom — Its Reception by the English People.

WHILE the English New Testament was approaching the shores of Britain, preparations, all unsuspected by :men, were being made for its reception. The sower never goes forth till first the plough has opened the furrow. Bilney, as we have already said, was the first convert whom the Greek New Testament of Erasmus had drawn away from the Pope to sit at the feet of Christ. When Tyndale was compelled to seek a foreign shore, Bilney remained behind in England. His face was pale, for his constitution was sickly, and his fasts were frequent; but his eye sparkled, and his conversation was full of life, indicating, as Fox tells us, the vehement desire that burned within him to draw others to the Gospel. Soon we find him surrounded by a little company of converts from the students and Fellows of Cambridge. Among these was George Stafford, professor of divinity, whose pure life and deep learning made his conversion as great a loss to the supporters of the old religion as it was a strength to the disciples of the Protestant faith. But the man of all this little band destined to be hereafter the most conspicuous in the ranks of the Reformation was Hugh Latimer.

Latimer was the son of a yeoman, and was born at Thurcaston, in Leicestershire, about the year 1472. He entered Cambridge the same year (1505) that Luther entered the Augustine Convent; and he became a Fellow of Clare Hall in the year (1509) that Calvin was born. Of a serious turn of mind from his boyhood, he gave himself ardently to the study of the schoolmen, and he so drank in their spirit, that when he took orders he was noted for his gloomy asceticism. The outbreak of what he deemed heresy at Cambridge gave him intolerable pain; he railed spitefully against Stafford, who was giving lectures on the Scriptures, and he could hardly refrain from using violence to compel his companions to desist from reading the Greek New Testament. The clergy were delighted to. see such zeal for the Church, and they rewarded it by appointing him cross-bearer to the university.[1] The young priest strode on before the doctors, bearing aloft the sacred symbol, with an air that showed how proud he was of his office. He signalized the taking of his degree as Bachelor of Divinity, by delivering a violent Latin discourse against Philip Melancthon and his doctrines.

But there was one who had once been as great a zealot as himself, who was watching his career with deep anxiety, not unmingled with hope, and was even then searching in his quiver for the arrow that should bring down this strong man. This was Bilney. After repeated failures he found at last the shaft that, piercing Latimer's armor, made its way to his heart. "For the love of God," said Bilney to him one day, "be pleased to hear my confession."[2] It was a recantation of his Lutheranism, doubtless thought Latimer, that was to be poured into his ear. Bilney dropped on his knees before Latimer, and beginning his confession, he unfolded his former anguish, his long but fruitless efforts for relief, his peace at last, not in the works prescribed by the Church, but in the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world; in short, he detailed the whole history of his conversion. As he spoke, Latimer felt the darkness within breaking up. He saw a new world rising around him — he felt the hardness of his heart passing away — there came a sense of sin, and with it a feeling of horror, and anon a burst of tears; for now the despair was gone, the flee forgiveness of the Gospel had been suddenly revealed to him. Before rising up he had confessed, and was absolved by One who said to him, "Son, be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee." So has Latimer himself told us in his sermons. His conversion was instantaneous.

That ardor of temperament and energy of zeal, which Latimer had aforetime devoted to the mass, he now transferred to the Gospel. The black garment of asceticism he put off at once, and clothed himself with the bright robe of evangelical joy. He grasped the great idea of the Gospel's absolute freeness even better than Bilney, or indeed than any convert that the Protestantism of the sixteenth century had yet made in England; and he preached with a breadth and an eloquence which had never before been heard in an English pulpit. He was now a true cross-bearer, and the effects that followed gave no feeble presage of the glorious light with which the preaching of the Cross was one day to fill the realm.

While the day was opening on Cambridge, its sister Oxford was still sitting in the night, but now the Protestant doctrines began to be heard in those halls around which there still lingered, like a halo, the memories of Wicliffe. Wolsey unwittingly found entrance here for the light. Intending to rear a monument which should perpetuate his name to after-ages, the cardinal projected a new college at this university, and began to build in a style of most unexampled magnificence. The work was so costly that the funds soon fell short. Wolsey obtained a supply by the dissolution of the monastery of St. Fridewide, which, having been surrendered to the Crown, was bestowed by Henry on the cardinal. A Papal bull was needed, and procured, to sanction the transfer. Wolsey, protected by this precedent, as he thought, proceeded to confiscate a few smaller monasteries; but a clamor arose against him as assailing the Church; he was compelled to stop, and it was said of him that he began to build a college and ended by building a kitchen. But the more vital part of the college went forward: six public lectureships were established — one of theology, one of civil law, one of medicine, one of philosophy, one of mathematics, and one of the Greek language. Soon after Wolsey added to these a chair of humanity and rhetoric.[3] He sought all through Europe for learned men to fill its chairs, and one of the, first to be invited was John Clark, a Cambridge Master of Arts, learned, conscientious, and enlightened by the Word of God; and no sooner had he taken his place at that famous school than he began to expound the Scriptures and make converts. Are both universities to become fountains of heresy? asked the clergy in alarm. The bishops sent down a commission to Cambridge to make an investigation, and apprehend such as might appear to be the leaders of this movement. The court sat down, and the result might have been what indeed took place later, the planting of a few stakes, had not an order suddenly arrived from Wolsey to stop proceedings. The Papal chair had again become vacant, and Wolsey was of opinion, perhaps, that to light martyr-fires at that moment in England would not tend to further his election: as a consequence, the disciples had a breathing-space. This tranquil period was diligently improved. Bilney visited the poor at their own homes, Stafford redoubled his zeal in teaching, and Latimer waxed every day more bold and eloquent in the pulpit. Knowing on what task Tyndale was at this time engaged, Latimer took care to insist with special emphasis on the duty of reading the Word of God in one's mother tongue, if one would avoid the snares of the false teacher.

Larger congregations gathered round Latimer's pulpit every day. The audience was not an unmixed one; all in it did not listen with the same feelings. The majority hung upon the lips of the preacher, and drank in his words, as men athirst do the cup of cold water; but here and there dark faces, and eyes burning with anger, showed that all did not relish the doctrine. The dullest among the priesthood could see that the Gospel of a free forgiveness could establish itself not otherwise than upon the ruins of their system, and felt the necessity of taking some remedial steps before the evil should be consummated. For this they chose one of themselves, Prior Buckingham, a man of slender learning, but of adventurous courage.

Latimer, passing over Popes and Councils, had made his appeal to the Word of God; the prior was charged, therefore, to show the people the danger of reading that book. Buckingham knew hardly anything of the Bible, but setting to work he found, after some search, a passage which he thought had a very decidedly dangerous tendency. Confident of success he mounted the pulpit, and opening the New Testament he read out, with much solemnity, "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee." This, said he, is what the Bible bids us do. Alas! if we follow it, England in a few years will be a "nation full of blind beggars." Latimer was one of those who can answer a fool according to his folly, and he announced that next Sunday he would reply to the Grey Friar. The church was crowded, and in the midst of the audience, planted right before the pulpit, in the frock of St. Francis, sat Prior Buckingham. this fancied triumph could yet be read on his brow, for his pride was as great as his ignorance.

Latimer began; he took up one by one the arguments of the prior, and not deeming them worthy of grave refutation, he exposed their absurdity, and castigated their author in a fine vein of irony and ridicule. Only children, he said, fail to distinguish between the popular forms of speech and their deeper meanings — between the image and the thing which the image represents. "For instance," he continued, fixing his eye on Buckingham, "if we see a fox painted preaching in a friar's hood, nobody imagines that a fox is meant, but that craft and hypocrisy are described, which are so often found disguised in that garb."[4] The blush of shame had replaced the pride on Buckingham's brow, and rising up, he hastily quitted the church, and sought his convent, there to hide his confusion.

When the prior retired in discomfiture, a greater functionary came forward to continue the battle. The Bishop of Ely, as Ordinary of Cambridge, forbade Latimer to preach either in the university or in the diocese. The work must be stopped, and this could be done only by silencing its preacher. But if the bishop closed one door, the providence of God opened another. Robert Barnes, an Englishman, had just returned from Louvain, with a great reputation for learning, and was assembling daily crowds around him by his lectures on the great writers of antiquity, in the Augustine Convent, of which he had been appointed prior. From the classics he passed to the New Testament, carrying with him his audience.

In instructing his hearers he instructed himself also in the Divine mysteries of the Pauline Epistles. About the time that the eloquent voice of Latimer was silenced by the Bishop of Ely, Barnes had come to a fuller knowledge of the Gospel; and, tenderly loving its great preacher, he said to Latimer one day, "The bishop has forbidden you to preach, but my monastery is not under his jurisdiction; come and preach in my pulpit." The brief period of Latimer's enforced silence had but quickened the public interest in the Gospel. He entered the pulpit of the Augustine Convent; the crowds that gathered round him were greater than ever, and the preacher, refreshed in soul by the growing interest that was taken in Divine things by doctors, students, and townspeople, preached with even greater warmth and power. The kingdom of the Gospel was being established in the hearts of men, and a constellation of lights ]had risen in the sky of Cambridge — Bilney, the man of prayer; Barnes, the scholar; Stafford, whose speech dropped as the dew; and Latimer, who thundered in the pulpit, addressing the doctors in Latin, and the common people in their own mother tongue — true yokefellows all of them; their gifts and modes of acting, which were wonderfully varied, yet most happily harmonized, were put forth in one blessed work, on which God the Spirit was setting his seal, in the converts which, by their labors, were being daily added to the Gospel.

This was not as yet the day, but it was the morning — a sweet and gracious morning, which was long remembered, and often afterwards spoken about in terms which have found their record in the works of one of the converts of those times -

"When Master Stafford read,
And Master Latimer preached,
Then was Cambridge blessed."[5]

Similar scenes, though not on a scale quite so marked, were at this hour taking place in Oxford. Almost all the scholars whom Wolsey had brought to fill his new chairs evinced a favor for the new opinions, or openly ranged themselves on their side. Wolsey, in selecting the most learned, had unwittingly selected those most friendly to Reform. Besides Clark, whom we have already mentioned, and the new men, there was John Fryth, the modest but stable-minded Christian, who had been Tyndale's associate in preparing an instrumentality which was destined soon and powerfully to dispel the darkness that still rested above England, and which was only feebly relieved by the partial illumination that was breaking out at the two university seats of Cambridge and Oxford.

A desire had now been awakened in the nation at large for the Word of God, and that desire could be gratified not otherwise than by having the Scriptures in its own tongue. The learned men of England had been these nine years in possession of Erasmus' Greek and Latin New Testament, and in it they had access to the fountain-heads of Divine knowledge, but the common people must receive the Gospel at second hand, through preachers like Latimer. This was a method of communication slow and unsatisfactory; something more direct, full, and rapid could alone satisfy the popular desire. That wish was about to be gratified. The fullness of the time for the Bible being given to England in her own tongue, and through England to the world in all the tongues of earth, had now come. He who brings forth the sun from the chambers Of the sky at his appointed hour, now gave commandment that this greater light should come forth from the darkness in which it had been so long hidden. William Tyndale, the man chosen of God for this labor, had, as we have seen, finished his task. The precious treasure he had put on board ship, and the waves of the North Sea were at this hour bearing it to the shores of England.

Tyndale had entrusted the copies of his New Testament, not to one, but to several merchants. Carrying it on board, and hiding it among their merchandise, they set sail with the precious volume from Antwerp. As they ascended the Thames they began to be uneasy touching their venture. Cochlaeus had sent information that the Bible translated by Tyndale was about to be sent into England, and had advised that the ports should be watched, and all vessels coming from Germany examined; and the merchants were likely to find, on stepping ashore, the king's guards waiting to seize their books, and to commit themselves to prison. Their fears were disappointed. They were allowed to unload their vessels without molestation. The men whom the five pious merchants had imagined standing over the Word of God, ready to destroy it the moment it was landed on English soil, had been dispersed. The king was at Eltham keeping his Christmas; Tonstall had gone to Spain; Cardinal Wolsey had some pressing political matters on hand; and so the portentous arrival of which they had been advertised was overlooked. The merchants conveyed the precious treasure they had carried across the sea to their establishments in Thames Street. The Word of God in the mother tongue of the people was at last in England.

But the books must be put into circulation. The merchants knew a pious curate, timid in things of this world, bold in matters of the faith, who they thought might be willing to undertake the dangerous work. The person in question was Thomas Garret, of All Hallows, Honey Lane. Garret had the books conveyed to his own house, and hid them there till he should be able to arrange for their distribution. Having meanwhile read them, and felt how full of light were these holy books, he but the more ardently longed to disseminate them. He began to circulate them in London, by selling copies to his friends. He next started off for Oxford, carrying with him a large supply. Students, doctors, monks, townspeople began to purchase and read.[6] The English New Testament soon found its way to Cambridge; and from the two universities it was in no long time diffused over the whole kingdom. This was in the end of 1525, and the beginning of 1526. The day had broken in England with the Greek and Latin New Testament of Erasmus; now it was approaching noontide splendor with Tyndale's English New Testament.

We in this age find it impossible to realize the transition that was now accomplished by the people of England. To them the publication of the Word of God in their own tongue was the lifting up of a veil from a world of which before they had heard tell, but which now they saw. The wonder and ravishment with which they gazed for the first time on objects so pure, so beautiful, and so transcendently majestic, and the delight with which they were filled, we cannot at all conceive. There were narratives and doctrines; there were sermons and epistles; there were incidents and prayers; there were miracles and apocalyptic visions; and in the center of all these glories, a majestic Personage, so human and yet so Divine; not the terrible Judge which Rome had painted him; but the Brother: very accessible to men, "receiving sinners and eating with them." And what a burden was taken from the conscience by the announcement that the forgiveness of the Cross was altogether free! How different was the Gospel of the New Testament from the Gospel of Rome! In the latter all was mystery, in the former all was plain; the one addressed men only in the language of the schools, the other spoke to them in the terms of every day. In the one there was a work to be done, painful, laborious; and he that came short, though but in one iota, exposed himself to all the curses of the law; in the other there was simply a gift to be received, for the work had been done for the poor sinner by Another, and he found himself at the open gates of Paradise. It needed no one but his own heart, now unburdened of a mighty load, and filled with a joy never tasted before, to tell the man that this was not the Gospel of the priest, but the Gospel of God; and that it had come, not from Rome, but from Heaven.

Another advantage resulting from what Tyndale had done was that the Scriptures had been brought greatly more within reach of all classes than they ever were before. Wicliffe's Bible existed only in manuscript, and its cost was so great that only noblemen or wealthy persons could buy it. Tyndale's New Testament was not much more than a twentieth part the cost of Wicliffe's version. A hundred years before, the price of Wicliffe's New Testament was nearly three pounds sterling; but now the printed copies of Tyndale's were sold for three shillings and sixpence. If we compare these prices with the value of money and the wages of labor at the two eras, we shall find that the cost of the one was nearly forty times greater than that of the other; in other words, the wages of a whole year would have done little more than buy a New Testament of Wicliffe's, whereas the wages of a fortnight would suffice for the laborer to possess himself of a copy of Tyndale's.

CHAPTER 5 Back to Top

THE BIBLE AND THE CELLAR AT OXFORD — ANNE BOLEYN.

Entrance of the Scriptures — Garret carries them to Oxford — Pursuit of Garret — His Apprehension — Imprisonments at Oxford — The Cellar — Clark, Fryth, etc., do Penance — Their Sufferings — Death of Clark-Other Three Die — The Rest Released — Cambridge — Dr. Barnes Apprehended — A Penitential Procession in London — Purchase and Burning of Tyndale's Testaments by the Bishop of London — New Edition — The Divorce Stirred — Anne Boleyn — Her Beauty and Virtues — Knight Sent to Rome on the Divorce — A Captive Pope — Two Kings at his Feet.

WHEN God is to begin a work of reformation in the world, he first sends to men the Word of Life. The winds of passion — the intrigues of statesmen, the ambitions of monarchs, the wars of nations — next begin to blow to clear the path of the movement. So was it in England. The Bible had taken its place at the center of the field; and now other parties — Cardinal Wolsey and King Henry within the country; the Pope, the Emperor, and the King of France outside of it — hastened to act their important though subordinate parts in that grand transformation which the Bible was to work on England. It is on this troubled stage that we are about to set foot; but first let us follow a little farther the immediate fortunes of the newly translated Scriptures, and the efforts made to introduce them into England.

The cardinal and the Bishop of London soon learned that the English New Testament had entered London, and that the Curate of-All Hallows had received the copies, and had hidden them in his ]muse. Search was made through all the city for Garret. He could not be found, and they were now told that he had gone to Oxford "to make sale of his heretical books."[1]

They immediately dispatched officers to search for him in Oxford, and "burn all and every his aforesaid books, and him too if they could find him."[2] On the Tuesday before Shrove-tide, Garret was warned that the avengers of heresy were on his track, and that if he remained in Oxford he was sure to fall into the hands of the cardinal, and be sent to the Tower. Changing his name, he set out for Dorsetshire, but on the road his conscience smote him; he stopped, again he went forward, again he stopped, and finally he returned to Oxford, which he reached late at night. Weary with his wanderings, he threw himself upon his bed, where, soon after midnight, he was apprehended by Wolsey's agents, and given into the safe keeping of Dr. Cottisford, commissary of the University. A second attempt at flight was followed by arrest and imprisonment. Oxford was lost, the priests felt, unless the most summary measures were instantly adopted. All the friends of the Gospel at that university were apprehended, and thrown into prison. About a score of doctors and students were arrested, besides monks and canons, so widely had the truth spread. Of the number were Clark, one of the first to receive the truth; Dalabar, a disciple of Clark; John Fryth, and eight others of Wolsey's College. Corpus Christi, Magdalen, and St. Mary's Colleges also furnished their contribution to those now in bonds for the Gospel's sake. The fact that this outbreak of heresy, as the cardinal accounted it, had occurred mainly at his own college, made him only the more resolute on the adoption of measures to stop it. In patronizing literature he had been promoting heresy, and the college which he had hoped would be the glory of Oxford, and a bulwark around the orthodoxy of England, had become the opprobrium of the one and a menace to the other.

The cardinal had now to provide a dungeon for the men whom he had sought for with so much pains, through England and the Continent, to place in his new chairs. Their prison was a damp, dark cellar below the buildings of the college, smelling rankly of the putrid articles which were sometimes stored up in it.[3] Here .these young doctors and scholars were left, breathing the fetid air, and enduring great misery. On their examination, two only were dismissed without punishment: the rest were condemned to do public penance for their. erroneous opinions. A great fire was kindled in the market-place: the prisoners, than whom, of all the youth at Oxford, none had a finer genius, or were more accomplished in letters, were marshaled in procession, and with fagot on shoulder they marched through the streets to where the bonfire blazed, and finished their penitential performance by throwing their heretical books into it.[4] After this, they were again sent back to their foul dungeon.

Prayers and animated conversations beguiled the first weeks of their doleful imprisonment. But by-and-by the chilly damp and the corrupted air did their terrible work upon them. Their strength ebbed away, their joints ached, their eyes grew dim, their features were haggard, their limbs