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fulfilled the motto of Crux de cruce,' cross upon cross, trouble 'upon trouble, entanglement upon entanglement,' the next Pope, according to the same prophecy, is to be Lumen de cœlo; and surely it is not in itself too much to imagine that one such Pope as we have ventured to suggest-one man of sense, courage, and honesty-might be found; and that if he were found, he would indeed be a light from heaven to an horizon which in proportion as it is now dark with an unwonted blackness, would welcome even the faintest dawning of better things. Such an expectation may be chimerical; but there are too many interests bound up in the destinies of the Roman Church to allow us to abandon it without a struggle. And, therefore, stormy as is the history which we have had to describe, we cling to the expression of hope-inspired, if not actually composed by the murdered Archbishop of Paris-that the excess of evil 'will provoke the return of good. The Council of the Vatican 'will remain sterile. . . . But it will have revealed, not only to 'what a point the best institutions and the best instincts can 'be turned by the spirit of despotic authority, but also it will 'have shown the value of the right cause, even when it has but 'a few to defend it. The Spartans who fell at Thermopyla 'to guard the land of liberty, prepared against the forces of tyranny the crowning defeat of Salamis.'

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ART. VI.-Dictionnaire critique, littéraire et bibliographique des principaux livres condamnés au feu, supprimés ou censurés. Par G. PEIGNOT. Paris: 1806.

THE

HE history of the books which have been suppressed or censured in England is curious and interesting; and although we have no book in our language which rivals the Dictionary of literary martyrdom, published in France at the commencement of the present century by M. Peignot, we have collected some materials on the subject which may interest our readers.

The burning of heretical books is by no means, as might be supposed, a Christian invention. It is questionable whether the writings of Protagoras were really destroyed at Athens

that name, who occupied the See of Armagh in the twelfth century. They were really composed in the sixteenth century, and contain a series of mottoes supposed to designate the successive Popes from that time till the end of the world.

VOL. CXXXIV. NO. CCLXXIII.

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for their atheistical tendencies, but the existence of the report shows that the idea, at all events, was not alien to Greek sentiment, and the judicial murder of Socrates is a proof that the State was no stranger to the worst acts of intolerance. The destruction of Christian books formed part of heathen persecution; Diocletian, especially, in A.D. 303 ordering all such writings to be surrendered to the magistrates and committed to the flames. To Osius, Bishop of Cordova, the friend of Athanasius and Constantine, is ascribed the introduction of the practice among Christians. It was probably by his advice that the Emperor commanded all the writings of Arius to be burnt, and anyone found in possession of them after the publication of the edict to be put to death. In 435 an Armenian Council ordered the destruction of the writings of Nestorius, whilst the Constantinopolitan one of 680 showed the same marks of attention to those of the 'infallible' Pope Honorius.

Various devices were employed in England for the repression of heresy and false teaching. At first it was altogether a question of Church discipline, the bishops having sole jurisdiction in such cases; the punishments also were ecclesiastical -penance and excommunication. But in 1382 the State began to interfere. The occasion arose from the dangerous doctrines Wyclif had set afloat on the subject of property -Wat Tyler's insurrection being an illustration of the extremes to which the Lollards were carrying that teaching. The insurrection itself began, indeed, upon other grounds, nor does it seem that Wyclif himself was in any way concerned with it; but Friar John Balle, whose famous text at Blackheath was,

'When Adam dalve and Eave span,
Who was then a gentleman?'

confessed before his death that he had been for two years a pupil of Wyclif, and had no doubt derived thence, in part at least, his revolutionary principles. The bishops had no longer the power to suppress these inflammatory doctrines, for the preachers of them kept moving from one diocese to another, and denied at the same time the jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Courts. Parliament accordingly passed an Act, directing the authorities to arrest all such preachers, and to hold them in arrest and strong prison, till they will justify themselves 'to the law and reason of Holy Church.' Still the mischief continued, and in 1401 a far more severe Act was passed, so well known as the Act de hæretico comburendo.'

The protomartyr of Wycliffism,' as Dean Milman calls

him, was W. Sawtree, at one time the priest of St. Margaret's, in King's Lynn, but then a preacher at St. Osyth's in the city of London. Before coming to London he had been convicted of denying transubstantiation, a circumstance which, on his second trial, he had the audacity to say had never occurred. He was condemned as a relapsed heretic, and handed over to the civil authorities.

'Sawtree,' says Dr. Shirley,† 'is usually spoken of as the first victim of the statute de hæretico comburendo. But it is remarkable that the writ for his execution appears on the Rolls of Parliament before the Act itself. This order may be merely a matter of arrangement, but it is observable that if the Act had been already passed, the writ would have been issued, as a matter of course, to the sheriff, and would never have appeared on the Rolls at all. It appears probable therefore that Sawtree suffered under a special Act, proposed perhaps by the clerical party in order to ascertain the feeling of Parliament as to the larger measure that followed.'

The last instances of the execution of heretics occurred in 1612, when Bartholomew Legate was burnt at Smithfield for holding opinions very similar to those of the Unitarians of our own day-a like punishment being given that same year to Edward Wightman, at Litchfield, for holding no less than nine ⚫ damnable heresies.' Popular feeling, however, seems to have become so strong upon the subject, that this method of repressing false doctrine was never resorted to again.

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The book against which the most unceasing crusades were made was the English translation of the Bible. Ten years after Wyclif had finished his translation, in 1380, an attempt was made in the House of Lords to pass a bill for suppressing On that occasion, however, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, stoutly declared that he would maintain our having 'this law in our own tongue, whoever they should be that 'brought in the bill,' and the attempt failed for the time. Afterwards, however, the reading or possession of that version was made a capital crime, and there are many instances on record where the extreme punishment was inflicted.

On December 2, 1525, Edward Lee, afterwards Archbishop of York, writes to the King from Bordeaux, telling him that 'An Englishman, your subject, at the solicitation and instance of Luther, with whom he is, hath translated the New Testa'ment into English, and within a few days intendeth to return

History of Latin Christianity, vol. viii. p. 211, 3rd ed.

† Pref. to Fasciculi zizaniorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum tritico, in Rerum Britannicarum medii ævi Scriptores. (London: 1858.)

The Englishman

with the same imprinted into England.' was Tyndal, and his translation the first ever printed in English. Two editions apparently were struck off in 1525-the first at Cologne, the second at Worms, and a third at Antwerp in 1526. Of the first, a fragment of thirty-one leaves in the Grenville Library is the only one known; of the second, a perfect copy except the title is in the Baptist Museum, Bristol; of the third, no copy is known to exist. The earliest had a narrow escape from destruction before leaving the printers. Cochlæus tells us in his History of Martin Luther that, whilst at Cologne superintending the printing of the works of Abbot Rupert, he had information that two Englishmen were bringing out a work that would convert all England to Lutheranism. By inviting the printers to his lodgings and plying them with wine, he extracted from them the intelligence that the book was the New Testament. He gave immediate information to one of the Cologne magistrates, and had the office searched. But Tyndal and his companions had taken the alarm, and carried off the sheets, which had been printed as far as signature K, the edition consisting of 3,000 copies. It had marginal notes and a prologue, the Cologne one containing the text only.

Hearing of these proceedings, the English bishops took immediate action, and subscribed among themselves to purchase as many copies as possible, especially of the Antwerp edition, Archbishop Warham being apparently the prime mover in the matter, though Tonstall, Bishop of London, was the means of its being carried out. The details will be found in Foxe. A large number of copies were secured, and on Shrove Sunday 1527, there was a grand demonstration at St. Paul's, and the offending volumes were solemnly committed to the flames, Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, preaching the sermon on the occasion.

This burning is alluded to in a very scurrilous publication which appeared probably soon afterwards, though the date of its appearance is very uncertain, called

'Rede me and be nott wrothe,

For I saye no thynge but trothe,'

the authorship of which is usually attributed to W. Roye, a friar observant of the Franciscan order at Greenwich. It consists mainly of a ribald attack upon the caytyfe' Wolsey, who spared neither pains nor expense to destroy the work. İn

* Ellis's Letters, 3rd Ser. vol. ii.
† Froude, vol. ii. p. 42, note.

p. 71.

Ibid. pp. 43-45.

1546 a second edition, considerably altered, was published by Jerome, a friend of Roye, in which the abuse of the Cardinal was transferred to the Romish bishops in general. Perhaps not more than half a dozen copies of the original edition are in existence; one of these is in the Grenville Library in the British Museum.

In June 1530, the King took the first public notice of these translations, incited no doubt thereto by a memorial of the House of Commons which declared that the Acts against errors given by occasion of frantic seditious books compiled, published, and made in the English tongue were badly administered and required more strict laws to be made. Accordingly, he issued a proclamation, a copy of which was discovered some years ago in the Chapter House at Westminster, in which every person whiche hath the new testament or the olde translated in to Englysshe, or any other boke of holy Scripture 'so translated, beynge in printe, or copied out of the bokes 'nowe beinge in printe,' is commanded to give them up within fifteen days, as he wyll avoyde the Kynges high indignation and displeasure.' Bishop Stokesley presided at the burning of the Bibles on this occasion.

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The first version of the Bible set forth wyth the Kynges 'most gracious licence' was that of Coverdale, but it soon was practically superseded by that issued by Matthew' and revised by Cranmer, but based upon that of Tyndal. The question, however, about the version was finally settled by a proclamation, issued July 8, 1546, which orders that no man, woman or person of what estate, condition, or degree soever they be, shall after the last day of August next ensuing receive, have, take, or keep in his or their possession the text ' of the New Testament of Tyndal's or Coverdale's translation ' in English, nor any other than is permitted by the Act of 'Parliament, made in the Session of Parliament holden at 'Westminster in the 34th and 35th year of his Majesty's most ' noble reign.'

When the Scriptures were no longer interdicted, printers themselves began to supply only too satisfactory reasons why many of their editions should be suppressed. In the year 1631 in a Bible and Prayer Book printed by R. Barker and the a signs of John Bill, the word not' was omitted in the seventh commandment. An omission of precisely the same character is to be found in a German Bible printed at Halle in 1731. This discovery led to a further examination of the edition, which Laud* tells us brought to light not less than 1,000 mis

Works, vol. iv. p. 165. Oxford edition.

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