II. GREAT BRITAIN.

CHAPTER I.

POST-REFORMATION ENGLAND.

THE

LOLLARDS.

THE Puritans were the Protestant party in the Church of England. What were the sources of Puritanism? (1) The Lollards. As we have seen,' the Lollard movement was based on Scripture, and so discarded the hierarchy and the whole medieval church system. The Anglican Reformation was based on kingly absolutism, and so threw overboard the pope, but deliberately retained all that it could of the old doctrines and ways. But the Wyclif reformation had left an ineradicable impress on large sections of the people.

(2) The Bible. The history of English Bible translation is a fascinating chapter, but it must be passed over cursorily. Wyclif's version from the Vulgate (1380) did good work in its THE ENGLISH day.' William Tyndale, one of the first fruits of the BIBLE. Reformation, who could find no place in England for his good work, published the New Testament at Worms in 1525, and the Pentateuch in 1530. He worked immediately from the Greek and Hebrew. His version is racy and idiomatic, and forms the basis of all later translations. Tyndale himself suffered martyrdom at Vilvorde, near Brussels, October 6, 1536. It was for circulating his Bible that some of his brethren of the vanguard suffered under Henry. Miles Coverdale, whom we shall meet later, knew little Hebrew or Greek, but did know German and Latin, so that the title-page of his Bible, printed probably by Froschover at Zurich in 1535, reads: "Biblia: the Bible, that is, the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, faithfully and truly translated out of the Douche and Latin into English, MDXXXV." Coverdale's idiom is strong and forceful, and it is his version which is the basis of the Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer. The chaplain of the English merchants at Antwerp, John Rogers, was a friend of Tyndale, fell heir to his manuscripts, and in 1537 published an English Bible, which from Genesis to 2 Chronicles was 1 Above, pp. 44 f. See above, p. 24.

Tyndale's, and the rest Coverdale's, but edited and revised by him, with valuable prefatory matter, including a table of principal matters contained in the Bible, a kind of Bible index and concordance, with summaries before each chapter, and excellent notes-textual, doctrinal, and practical-at the end. The indefatigable Rogers, who was burned at Smithfield in 1555,' published his Bible under a pseudonym (Thomas Matthew) probably at Wittenberg, and his excellent book is the basis of the Authorized Version.

Richard Taverner, a fine Greek scholar, revised the so-called Matthew Bible at the suggestion of Cromwell, and in the New Testament made some excellent improvements which have been retained in the Common Version. It was published in London in 1539, and later appeared in parts, which helped its circulation. It had official sanction and was allowed to be read in churches. The same year, and a little before Taverner's, appeared the Great Bible, so-called on account of its size, which is a revision of Tyndale, Coverdale, and Rogers by Coverdale himself, undertaken at the request of Cromwell, and executed, on account of better type and presses, in Paris until the Inquisition pounced down upon the printers, when the work was removed to London. This famous Bible, which on account of the preface by Cranmer in the editions of 1540 and later has been misnamed Cranmer's Bible, and which ought really to be called Coverdale's second Bible, was very popular, and is the only English version which received formal royal sanction-the only true Authorized Version.' From it were taken the greater part of the Scriptures in the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552. On the whole, however, this Bible is inferior to John Rogers's.

More valuable than any of the preceding was the Genevan Bible, 1560, prepared by Whittingham, Sampson, and Gilby, assisted by the Genevan exiles, who had the advantage of both larger apparatus and better scholarship, and which was published at the expense of the English congregation at Geneva, of which John Bodley, father of the founder of the Bodleian

THE GENE-
VAN BIBLE.

1 See above, p. 421.

2 The Great Bible remained the Authorized Version for twenty-eight years. See Eadie, The English Bible, i, 383. The reviser had before him Luther's version, the Zurich version, the Latin translation of Sanctes Pagninus, 1528, and Sebastian Munster, 1534-35, in the Old Testament, and the Latin version of Erasmus, 1535, in the New.-Mombert, Handbook of the English Versions of the Bible, p. 209. It contains numerous paraphrastic and supplementary clauses from the Vulgate, which render it a less faithful work than that of Rogers.

Library, was a generous member. It was fortified with notes, original or selected, treating of theology, history, and geography. On this Bible the Puritans were nurtured. It was the popular English Bible of the seventeenth century, more than one hundred and thirty editions having been published up to 1644. It was a long time before the so-called Authorized Version of 1611 displaced it, and among the factors which made England a Protestantnation we must remember the Genevan Bible and its notes. The first Bible printed in Scotland, 1579, was the Genevan.' The success of the Genevan Bible and dissatisfaction with the Great Bible induced Archbishop Parker to put forth another version under Church auspices. He farmed out the various books among eight bishops and other learned men, who were carefully to revise the Great Bible with reference to the original texts and best versions. The result the Bishops' Bible-was published in superb form in 1568, and in a much improved and final edition in 1572, which last forms the immediate groundwork of the Authorized Version. Much of the revision was carefully done, but parts of it, especially in the Old Testament, were slighted. The influence of the Genevan Bible was apparent everywhere. The Bishops' Bible had much prefatory and explanatory matter, many of the notes being borrowed from the Genevan. This brief outline of the history of the English Bible will indicate one source at least of the Protestantism of Elizabeth's reign.

FOXE'S BOOK

(3) Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Foxe was a learned and liberalminded divine, who occupied the time of his exile on the Continent in writing a Church History, Acts and Monuments of these Latter Perilous Days Touching Matters of the OF MARTYRS. Churches, which he published in Basel in Latin in 1554, and enlarged in English in 1563. It passed through many editions, and was ordered by Elizabeth to be placed in the common halls of archbishops, bishops, and deans, and in all the colleges and chapels in England. The Bible and Foxe's book were thus chained side by side, the one to set forth what the true faith is, and the other the efforts to exterminate that faith from the earth. The influence

1 The edition of 1560 is sometimes called the Breeches Bible from its rendering of Gen. iii, 7. The Genevan was the first to restore the original form of the Hebrew names, the first to omit St. Paul from the title of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the first to use italic letters for supplemental words, and the first to deal with any critical discrimination with the Apocrypha. Eadie well says the preeminence of this "learned and cautious revision" in England was well deserved-ii, 15. So late as 1765 the Genevan notes appear in an edition of the Authorized Version of 1611.

of Foxe on the feelings and intellect of the English people was incalculable. Hatred of Rome soon became a national characteristic.'

ENGLISH
EXILES
ON THE

CONTINENT.

(4) Geneva and Germany. During Mary's reign English exiles poured into the Continent. They formed churches at Frankfort, Geneva, and elsewhere. They came in contact with more earnest types of Protestantism, and were profoundly influenced thereby. Especially did Calvin and his Church-state system at Geneva powerfully affect them. His holiness and loftiness of character, his clear intelligence and wide learning, his compact, logical, and scriptural theology, made a tremendous impression on all who knew him either personally or by his writings, and during Reformation times Geneva became the home of Protestantism. There were colonies of Englishmen in several of the towns of the Continent. They had their own services, their own pastors, their own literature. Here they translated the Bible into English, made their English hymns and liturgies, and were free to carry their reform as far as they chose. When these men returned to England, after the death of Mary, they were stanch Protestants. They were the nucleus of the Puritan party, which at length saved English religion and English liberty.

1 "When we recollect that, until the appearance of the Pilgrim's Progress in the next century, the common people had almost no reading matter except the Bible and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, we can understand the deep impression that this book produced, and how it served to mold the national character. Those who could read found there the full details of all atrocities committed on the Protestant reformers; the illiterate could see the rude illustrations of the various instruments of torture, the rack, the gridiron, the boiling oil, and then the holy martyrs breathing out their souls amid the flames. Take now a people just awakening to a new intellectual and religious life; let several generations of them from childhood to old age pore over such a book as this, and its stories become traditions as indelible and almost as potent as songs and customs on a nation's life. All the fiendish acts there narrated were the work of the Church of Rome, for no hint was given of any other side to the story. No wonder that among the masses, aside from any religious sentiment or conviction, there grew up a horror and detestation of the pope and the Romish Church which have not entirely lost their force after three centuries of Protestant domination. The influence of this feeling on the English people can hardly be exaggerated. The country squires who came to the parliament of Elizabeth, as a rule, probably cared little for religion, but they were united in their hatred of the papal power, and this hatred, always coupled with a dread, became more intense as time went on."-Douglas Campbell, The Puritan in Holland, England, and America (N. Y., Harpers, 1892), i, 442-443. Later editions, 1610 ff., were illustrated with copper cuts.

RELATIONS
OF ENGLAND

AND HOL
LAND.

(5) Holland. We cannot omit the Low Countries when we consider the sources of Puritanism. The debt which England owes to the little country across the channel, which, although only one fourth her size, had in the seventeenth century as large a population and much more wealth, has only recently been investigated or acknowledged. Skeat was the first to call attention to it. "I am convinced that the influence of the Dutch upon the English has been much underrated, and closer attention to this question might throw some light even upon English history. History tells us that our relations with the Netherlands have often been rather close. We read of Flemish mercenary soldiers being employed by the Normans, and of Flemish settlements in Wales, 'where,' says old Fabyan, I know not with what truth, they remained a long while, but after they spread all England over.' We may recall the alliance of Edward III and the free towns of Flanders, and the importation by Edward of Flemish weavers. Especially during the Spanish wars Dutch refugees swarmed over England. About all the finer industries of the English were in the hands of the Dutch. Their weavers made Norwich the second city in the kingdom. A stoppage of trade with Flanders would have broken half the merchants in London. It is estimated that between fifty and a hundred thousand came over to England during the persecutions. There were ten thousand in London, and as early as 1587 there were nearly five thousand in Norwich. These refugees were the most intelligent people in Europe. Holland was the instructor of Europe in agriculture, navigation, commerce, physical research, medical knowledge-the mother of scholars and jurists. "It was the center of varied literary activity when England was enveloped in the gross darkness of ignorance, and more books teemed from its presses than from all other parts of the Continent.""

2

1 Etymological Dict., Pref.

3 Gregory, Puritanism, Lond. and N. Y., 1896, p. 205.

"There is no nation in Europe," says the late Thorold Rogers, "which owes more to Holland than England does."-Story of Holland, p. 380. The first man to set forth adequately England's and America's debt to Holland was the late Douglas Campbell (d. 1893), of the New York bar, son of Judge William Campbell, of Cherry Valley, N. Y., author of Annals of Tryon County, in his great work, The Puritan in Holland, England, and America, 2 vols., N. Y., 1892. It is the result of many years' study and of the researches of many hands in the Dutch archives.