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January 18, 2019 - January 22, 2022
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.
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.
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 Reformation of England, perhaps to a greater extent than that of the Continent, was effected by the Word of God."
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
"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.
"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."
"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."
"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!"
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.
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.
Catherine Parr, the last and noblest of the wives of Henry VIII, assiduously aided the development of his moral character. Herself a lady of eminent virtue and great intelligence, she was at pains to instill into his mind those principles which should make his life pure, his reign prosperous, and his subjects happy.
Cranmer at this stage of his career. He was still a believer in the dogma of consubstantiation; and only by painful effort and laborious investigations did he reach the ground on which Zwingle and Calvin stood, and from which he could never afterwards be dislodged.
The Act ratifying the Book of Common Prayer contained also an authorization for the singing of psalms in public worship.
The act of uniformity .
they are the interpreters only, not the judge; the authority they possess is in exact proportion to the accuracy with which they interpret the Divine voice. Their authority can never be plenary, because their interpretation can never be more than an approximation to all truth as contained in the Scriptures.
The Bible alone must remain the one infallible authority on earth, seeing the prerogative of imposing laws on the consciences of men belongs only to God.
Calvin had publicly taught that opinions ought not to be punished by the sword unless promulgated to the disturbance of civil society.
The steadfast faith of a single martyr brings more real strength to a cause like Protestantism than any number of lukewarm adherents.
The men who perished in the fire under Mary were burned simply because they did not, and could not, believe in the corporeal presence in the Lord's Supper.
When Protestantism was in the ascendant, not one Papist had been put to death for his religion.
"Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man: we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out."
The Reformers set up the Bible, the Romanists planted the stake.
The doom of the Huguenots taught Elizabeth and the English Protestants that pledges and promises of peace were no security whatever against sudden and wholesale destruction.
The Armada was the mightiest effort in the shape of armed force ever put forth by the Popish Powers against Protestantism, and it proved the turning-point in the great war between Rome and the Reformation.
The tragedy of the Armada was a great sermon preached to the Popish and Protestant nations. The text of that sermon was that England had been saved by a Divine Hand.
The aim of the Puritans, beyond doubt, was to perfect the Reformation which Cranmer had left incomplete.
In all the countries of the Reformation a great intellectual awaking was the immediate consequence of the introduction of Protestantism.
By one quality were all the great thinkers and writers who illuminated the horizon of England in the Elizabethan age marked, namely, great creative power; and that eminently is the product of Protestantism.
To it we owe our great thinkers and writers. Had not the Reformation gone before, Bacon would never have opened the path to true science; Shakespeare's mighty voice would have been dumb for ever; Milton would never have written his epic; nor would John Bunyan have told us his dream; Newton would never have discovered the law of gravitation;
England, in reforming itself, worked mainly from the political center. Scotland worked mainly from the religious one.
The Lollards of England were the connecting link between their great master, Wicliffe, and the English Reformers of the sixteenth century.
The Bible was emphatically the nation's one great teacher; it was stamping its own ineffaceable character upon the Scottish Reformation; and the place the Bible this early made for itself in the people's affections, and the authority it acquired over their judgments, it was destined never to lose.
It is not, would lie say, the cowl of St. Francis, nor the frock of St. Dominic, that saves us; it is the righteousness of Christ. It is not the shorn head that makes a holy man, it is the renewed heart.
Patrick Hamilton
"I say with Paul," answered the confessor, "there is no mediator between God and us but Christ Jesus his Son, and whatsoever they be who call or pray to any saint departed, they spoil Christ Jesus of his office."
To the martyrs themselves the fire had no terror, because to them death had no sting.
The Reformation was the cry of the human conscience for pardon.
The Church of Rome, said he, is the Antichrist of Scripture.
John Knox
The intrepidity of Knox saved the Reformation from the; brand of timidity which the counsel of the lords, had it been followed, would have brought upon it.
The church was stripped of its images and pictures, and the monasteries were pulled down.
On the one side stood religion, like an angel of light, beckoning Scotland onwards; on the other stood the dark form of Popery, pulling the country back into slavery.
It is hardly possible to over-estimate the impotence of the service which Knox rendered. It not only led to the establishment of Protestantism in Scotland, and the perpetuation of it in England; but, in view of the critical condition in which Europe then was, it may indeed with justice be said that it saved the Reformation of Christendom.
Knox literally saved the Reformation in Great Britain.
Knox's idea of a Church was, in brief, a divinely originated, a divinely enfranchised, and a divinely governed society.
First came the Kirk Session, composed of the minister and elders, who managed the affairs of the congregation; next came the Presbytery, formed by the delegation of a minister and elder from every congregation within the shire; above it was the Synod, constituted by a minister and elder from each congregation within the province, and having, like the court below it, power to decide on all causes arising within its bounds.
The foundations of Presbyterianism defined and established.
Born to a throne, yet dying as a felon: excelling all the women of her time in the grace of her person and the accomplishments of her mind, and yet surpassing them in calamity and woe as far as she did in beauty and talent!
Proverb of Mary Stuart.
I doubt not, madam, you would know the vanity of the Papistical religion, and how little foundation it has in the Word of God."
Knox contended that its application was general, and that it was warranted by the notorious persecutions of the Papacy to exterminate Protestants.
Through all the ages of the future, the foremost place among Scotsmen must belong to Knox.
issued in the Revolution of 1688, which placed the Protestant House of Orange on the throne of Great Britain, and secured, under the sanction of an oath, that the constitution and sovereigns of the realm should in all time coming be Protestant.
the Covenanters were not a party but a nation, and the Covenant of Scotland, like its Reformation, was national.
