We began yesterday with a talk about the
perspective which went to the making of the
distinctive Puritan point of view.
And I spoke first of the legacy of
Tyndale, who first thought of the lordship of
the Bible, and second the thought of the
justified man in covenant with God, and then
secondly I looked at the legacy of Bradford,
which I defined as a piety of repentance
preached, written about, lived out.
I described to you from my sources something
of the rule, the rule of life that
Bradford made to himself with regards to prayer.
I ought perhaps to have said, when I
was doing that, that you mustn't misunderstand that
it's precisely not in Bradford the artificiality that
it might be in any of us who
imitated Bradford.
Bradford did what he did precisely in order
that he might be real with God regarding
sin and regarding repentance.
If we imitated some of these Puritans and
supposed that thereby we should find spiritual quickening
for ourselves we might very soon be disappointed.
Nobody gave Bradford this idea, he just did
it because he felt it would help him
to be real with God.
And as I told you, lots of Puritans
afterwards followed his example and they too found
that it helped them to be real with
God.
But here, and well certainly in many of
the other things that I'm going to tell
you about in this course, I wouldn't want
you to believe that the short and easy
way into new spiritual vitality for ourselves is
just to ape the Puritans for the very
good thing.
The principles which they applied have got to
be reapplied to us.
I do indeed believe, and as it comes
through by the way that I describe these
things, I do believe that the Puritans have
got a great deal to teach us.
But you can't you can't short-circuit the
business of the application.
The applications are not really made.
We've got to consider the principles that they
worked on and go on how they have
to be reapplied to us still today.
Well I told you about Bradford because here
you've got a priorlier example of the kind
of what the Puritans called experimental piety practical
and experimental godliness would have been their phrase
for it, which was reproduced again and again
in the history of this movement.
And I should have added that in the
letter of Bradford, which were published after his
death you find him doing something which again
became a staple Puritan activity in later years
that is bringing, well we'll use the phrase
they used bringing comfort to afflicted consciences by
resolving what the Puritans were to call cases
of conscience, problems and complexities about the life
of faith and obedience.
Haller, in his book The Elect Nation, page
208, writes of these letters of Bradford, what
Bradford did in them was what Greenham and
Richard Rogers and the long succession of spiritual
preachers would soon be doing.
At this point too, therefore, Bradford was a
pioneer.
At Milton's name Greenham and Richard Rogers, you'll
hear more of them before very long.
Here then is the legacy of Bradford, a
piety of repentance lived out, preached, written about.
And now we will move on to consider
the third element in the making of the
Puritan mind that which I've called the legacy
of Hooper, Hooper the man and Frankfurt, Frankfurt
the place and I've characterized this as a
passion for pastoral care and reformed church order.
Hooper exhibits both passions, but chiefly the passion
for pastoral care Frankfurt also displays both concerns
but chiefly the concern for a reformed order.
And I thought it was most helpful, therefore,
to lump these two together under the same
main heading.
Here first then is some text about John
Hooper He was born at the end of
the 15th century into a prominent Somersetshire family
and he became a Cistercian monk His convictions
became Protestant in a very decided way through
reading the writings of Zwingli and Bullinger sometime
in the 1530s.
In 1539 Henry VIII, who had so far
not opposed moves in the direction of reformation
faith and practice carries through Parliament, well that's
how it was for a feudal sovereign.
He said what Parliament was to pass and
Parliament passed it He carries through Parliament then
the so-called Acts of the Sixth Article.
Described by contemporary Protestants as a whip with
six strings It was an act laying down
various principles concerning religion in England One of
them was that any denial of sense of
sensation was punishable by burning as a heresy.
And when the Acts of the Sixth Article
came out Hooper, whose doctrine of the sacraments
was thoroughly whip, Zwinglian, Bullingerish decided that England
was no healthy place for him and left
the country and he went first to Strasbourg
and then he went to Zurich and he
was away apart from one small visit till
1549 Then, when Edward VI had come to
the throne Hooper came back and immediately became
a prominent man.
Because though he was a somewhat rough and
austere man, and indeed a somewhat tactless and
outspoken man, he was a very fine preacher.
Priorless in preaching and extremely popular when he
preached.
A contemporary writes that people hung on his
words and regarded him as a prophet.
Dickens in his history of the Reformation calls
him dynamic.
And straight away he attained prominence in London
as a great Reformation preacher.
In 1550 he was appointed to preach the
length and course of sermons at the court
of Edward VI and he chose to expound
the prophet Jonah because, as he wrote in
a letter, it enabled him quote, freely to
touch on the duties of an individual as
we would say in 1967 England, I don't
know if you say it in 1967 America,
to tear strips off people and we know
because we got the texts of his lectures
that he actually did tear strips off people
and denounce ungodliness and summon the courteous to
repentance and holy living in no mealy-mouthed
tone.
So that's the kind of man he was.
And in his closest friend was John Alasdair
whose name you may know, he was a
Polish nobleman who had at one time been
ordained as the Commarch Beacon of Warsaw.
But then he'd become a convinced civilian, swift
in his doctrine.
He'd moved to Emden as Superintendent Minister of
the Reformed Churches in Priestland.
And then in 1548 he came to England
again you see when Henry VIII died and
a Protestant monarch offended the English throne, Protestants
who were finding things difficult all over Europe
came to England and Alaska and London.
And he was put in charge of the
so-called Stranger's Church, a large congregation in
London which had four other ministers besides Alaska
and it was a church organised on the
full Reformed pattern and Alaska himself was a
man of certainly Reformed convictions on the sacraments
on justification, on other matters, and he was
Hooper's closest friend and Hooper liked the pattern
that he saw in the congregation on which
Alaska presided.
It was a proper Presbyterian set-up with
a group of elders, lay elders as well
as the five ministers, two hours preaching every
Sunday, an hour each of the two services,
and a preaching service in the week, and
a monthly communion preceded by discipline, that is
the examination of intended communicants by the elders.
That's the kind of pattern that Calvin campaigned
for in Geneva and that's the kind of
pattern which Alaska set up in the Stranger's
Church in London.
Now these were things, these were all things
which fired Hooper's imagination and seemed to him
to be ideal.
Now, in 1550 he was nominated to the
Episcopal See of Gloucester.
He had no addiction to being a bishop
indeed he looked forward right from the start
to the good that one might do as
bishop of an English diocese with two or
three hundred churches and clergy under your control
but yet he had his difficulties about the
means whereby constitutionally he must enter on his
bishopric.
He had to swear an oath of supremacy
to the sovereign by God and the faith.
He didn't object to the thought of the
sovereign's supremacy but he did object to swearing
by the faith equally he had to be
consecrated in traditional medieval Episcopal vestments, that is
a white rochet, as this was called, r
-o-c-h-e-t, it was a
sort of fancy surface, with a scarlet chenille
c-h-i-n-e-r-e, that
the gown that bishops wore then still wear
as a necessary over their surface with a
good deal of red in it that is
a still official Anglican Episcopal dress rochet and
chenille.
The one they were wearing as of long
ago in 1550 you see the Church of
England never changes not very much anyway.
And who could object to the thought of
being consecrated in these vestments the ordinal of
1550 under which he was to be consecrated
it was a reformed ordinal in its doctrine,
it was thoroughly protestant in its delineation of
the ministry, there was nothing about the offering
of the mass in sacrifice, all the questions
and the commissioning of ministers had to do
with the pastoral care and the evangelistic ministry
that they must fulfill towards their flock.
But the old vestments remained and Hooper objected
to the prospect of having to wear them
he judged they were sinful, positively sinful Alasco
agreed with him, nobody else did.
He protested there was a debate, eventually because
of his unspokenness in debate he was put
into prison for contempt because of the way
in which he denounced the ordinal that contained
these vestments.
In prison the arguments went on Archbishop Cranmer,
Archbishop of Canterbury and Ridley, Bishop of London,
debated with Hooper and persuaded him eventually that
his original judgement had been wrong and that
these clerical clothes were in fact matters of
indifference and they didn't therefore impose any real
obstacle or caution upon Hooper, an obstacle I
mean that would stop him from accommodating this
rhetoric.
And so in 1551 he was released from
prison and was given a consecrated bishop, wearing
the ascending vestments.
Although they had given in to him a
little they had allowed him to make a
public statement in which he said that he
would not be wearing these vestments regularly and
nobody must expect that he would So, whatever
you think of Hooper's judgement on this particular
issue, you can see purism scripturalism coming through.
Hooper's thinking on this matter, at least until
he was persuaded to change his mind, was
the thinking of a man who wasn't prepared
to do anything for which he hadn't got
such an example or such a precept.
Now, when he got to his diocese he
showed himself to be a man with a
true compassionate heart.
Here's just one or two sentences which will
illustrate that.
In 1551 he made an inquiry of his
clergy He sent round a questionnaire.
He asked them the following nine questions You
may feel they're pretty basic and that any
clergyman worth his salt ought to be able
to answer them.
Question 1 How many commandments are there?
Question 2 Where are they to be found?
Question 3 Repeat them.
Question 4 What are the articles of the
Christian faith?
That meant the creed Repeat them.
Lesson 5 and Question 6 Prove them from
Scripture.
7 Repeat the Lord's Prayer.
8 How do you know it is the
Lord?
9 Where is it to be found?
Well, you might not think that a questionnaire
like that would cause clergy very much trouble
but Hooper had 311 clergy in his diocese.
Of those 311 only 50 could answer all
the questions Of those 50, 19 could only
answer them mediocrity, that is in a mediocre
manner 39 didn't know the location of the
Lord's Prayer in Scripture.
34 didn't know the author.
10 couldn't repeat it 8 couldn't answer a
single one of the nine questions Such was
the ministry of England Now, it's important that
you should note this and bear it in
mind for the next 50 years of this
history.
In country areas not merely in England but
in all over Europe, in Germany also, the
rural clergy were absolutely abysmal as far as
Christian knowledge and Christian practice went.
Luther had to face exactly the same things
in some of the rural areas where the
Lutheran Reformation went and it's important to bear
this in mind because the Puritans all the
way through were taking their sort of guiding
star and their ideals from Swiss city-states
Zurich, Basel, Geneva.
And in Swiss city-states this sort of
problem, the problem of ignorant clergy in country
districts simply didn't arise.
This was a new problem which the Puritans
had to face and try and deal with
and doing that involved them in attempts to
apply their principles that the Swiss, whose principles
they had taken over never had to make.
Here then was one of the areas in
which the originality of the Puritan movement was
to come out.
As you will see later on, they had
their methods for dealing with this kind of
situation.
But for the moment, all that I'm concerned
to tell you about Hooper is that he
sent round this questionnaire in order to discover
what the clergy were like in order that
then he might send round to them episcopal
addresses of different sorts, articles, injunctions, and so
forth charges, and all the rest of it,
in order that he might educate them a
bit and bring them to a better mind,
so that they might fulfil a better ministry.
Another testimony to his quality as a Diocesan
Bishop is given by Dickens in his History
of the Reformation in England where he notes
on the basis of an article written by
a local historian who has rubbed through the
court records of the Diocese, research upon Hooper's
short but intensive career as a Diocesan Bishop
has intended to enlarge his stature.
Finding his clergy and officials lethargic and ineffective
Hooper went to work among them with all
his superhuman energy.
He presided in person over his Diocesan court,
he made frequent tours of the Diocese on
the spur of the moment.
His charity and concerns of the poor were
a daily manifest, and he made it clear
that his social sympathies lay not with the
landlords, but with the underprivileged.
Mr Price, this local historian, has written that
the personal touch of the Bishop regularly shines
through the dull formal records of the Diocesan
administration.
We see him bringing together unhappy husbands and
wives, restoring concord among families divided against themselves
over disputed wills, pointing out their follies to
gossiping and quarrelsome women, and giving good advice
to all in subject.
So you see, though he may in his
earlier career have given the impression of being
a wild man, he was a good pastor.
And this is the point that I want
to make at the moment.
Here in Hooper you've got the pioneer of
a man who, once put into a pastoral
situation, sends his strength in it, and gives
himself tirelessly to the preaching of the gospel
and the applying of it to human lives,
in order that there may be true spiritual
life, holiness unto the Lord, in terms of
real living piety.
And so Hooper continued until he was arrested
in 1563, after Mary had come to the
throne, and then condemned, of all the Marian
martyrs, were condemned for unorthodoxy in the doctrine
of the Lord's Supper, rejecting transubstantiation, and in
1565 he was burned, just about ten minutes
from the place where I was brought up
as a boy, in Gloucester.
We move on now from Hooper to the
Frankfurt story, which we take from a volume
published in 1574 called, A Brief History of
the Trouble at Frankfurt.
It was written almost certainly by William Whittingham,
W-H-I-T-T-I-M-G
-H-A-M, who by then had become
Dean of Durham, and who was, in fact,
one of the central figures in the story
of the Frankfurt Trouble.
From one standpoint, this is the story of
a storm in a teacup, but it was
a significant story because of the men in
the teacup.
Amongst the little refugee community of Frankfurt, who
had been troubled, there were eleven future bishops,
five future deans, fox of archaeologists, and at
least one of Queen Elizabeth's future privy counsellors,
as well as some other men of lesser
knowledge.
But it is a story.
In 1554, a company of English exiles, remember
there were about 800 English exiles altogether under
Mary, they went to different reform centres on
the continent, and in 1554 a company of
them came to Frankfurt.
William Whittingham, an Oxford man, an aristocrat, a
layman, at that time at any rate, he
was ordained later, he led up this party
to Frankfurt, and the first thing that he
did was to get permission from the magistrate
for the party of exiles to use the
Church of the White Ladies, as it was
called, which church was already being used by
another party of Protestant exiles from England, the
Church of Flemish Weavers, who had been planted
under the pastorship of Valéran Poulin, at the
weaving centre of Glastonbury and Somerset, as its
congregation had set up there in the days
of Edward V.
And they'd already come to Frankfurt, and they
were worshipping regularly in the Church of the
White Ladies, lent to them for that purpose.
And the magistrate granted Whittingham and his party
permission to worship in the Church of the
White Ladies, on condition that they should use
a service similar to that which the Flemish
Weavers were using.
Well, this presented no problem to Whittingham and
his friends, and they drew up a similar
service, which was much more like the austere
orders of worship used at Zurich and Geneva,
than it was like the second prayer book
of Edward VI, which the Englishmen, of course,
had been using until they left the country.
So the order, muddled on the chaldeans, the
Zurich and Glasgow's order, was drawn up.
There were no scruples at all, there were
no responses said, there were even, to our
surprise, no readings from Scripture, only the expounding
of Scripture in the sermons.
The constitution for the congregation was drawn up
too, on the Alasco pattern.
And they chose themselves a minister, and settled
down to live their church life, as an
emigre community.
And since they knew that they were the
only English church that had managed to organise
itself a full church life, in any of
the continental centres to which English exiles had
gone, Whittingham, in the church's name, wrote a
letter to the other exile communities, summoning them,
in very parently words as a matter of
fact, summoning them to come and join the
Frankfort Party, and enjoy the benefits of the
full church life, which the Frankfort community had.
Undoubtedly Whittingham and his friends had, as part
of their motives here, the desire to establish
at Frankfort a pattern more like that of
other reformed churches which could then be taken
back to England when the tyranny of Mary
came to an end, and be made the
pattern for the new establishment of reformed religion
in that country.
So they summoned as many Englishmen as they
could hear of on the continent, to come
and join them at Frankfort, in order that
there might be as large and impressive a
community there as possible, taking this reformed order
back.
That at least was the plan.
While they were waiting for answers to their
letters, the famous John Knox came from England,
and joined the congregation at Frankfort, and was
elected a second minister.
Well, when the letters came back they were
not all of them in favour of the
Frankfort project.
The exiles of Zurich wrote that they, at
the moment, when they could get together for
worship, were using the second prayer book of
Edward VI, and they declined to stop using
it, or to join a community that had
stopped using it, lest it should reflect badly
on the Reformation martyrs.
That is, those bishops whose dignitaries would have
stayed at home in England, under Mary, and
were even at that time being sent one
after another to the French.
They had, after all, been the sponsors of
the second prayer book.
Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was burned in
1555 had actually been responsible for drawing it
up, and the Zurich exiles didn't want to
do anything that would involve an adverse judgment
on the prayer book, and so, in effect,
cut the blot on the memory of those
who had drawn it up, the Marian martyrs.
So, they said, you must have a little
bit more light.
The prayer book we are used to, we
are used to doing it.
So, letters went to and fro, and negotiations
took place, and the order of worship which
Whittingham and his friends had drawn up was
amended, so as to conform more closely to
the 1552 pattern.
They brought Calvin's 1550 Geneva Liturgy as a
model, and took some details from that, and
the compromise was being agreed on.
They sent the letter to Calvin, asking him
what he thought of the 1552 English prayer
book, and they got back the letter, saying
that though it wasn't too bad, it wasn't
too good either.
It contained various tolerables in it, foolish things
which could be endured, and so the argument
went on until in February 1555 they finally
agreed on a liturgy with which everybody was
going to be happy, and it seemed that
the Zurich people would come and everything in
the garden was going to be lovely.
That was February 1555.
It only lasted six weeks, this happy, tranquil
state, because in March of that year, a
new group of English exiles arrived, led by
a certain Richard Cock, who in his day
had been tutor to Edward VI, Vice-Chancellor
of the University of Oxford, and Dean of
Westminster, and obviously, with all that behind him,
would have regarded himself as quite a significant
figure.
He came, leading this party of exiles to
Frankfurt, and as soon as they got there,
they broke the agreement.
They broke it straight away, at least Cock
broke it, by insisting on intoning responses in
public worship, whereas the Frankfurt form had no
responses from the congregation, and when the future
Bishop Jewell, John Jewell, another of the Cock's
party, was asked to read the service one
day, he read the liturgy of the 1552
prayer book, which wasn't part of the Frankfurt
order, and so arguments broke out, and the
Frankfurt people said very reasonably, look, this is
not what we've agreed to do, and the
Cock'sian party replied in a very terrifying way,
that we will do as we have done
in England, we will have the faith of
an English church.
And he said that in the hearing of
John Knox, who made a very proper comment
on this statement, the Lord granted, said John
Knox, the Lord granted to have the faith
of Christ's church.
But he wasn't able to he wasn't able
to reduce that teacher Cock's deal by making
remarks like this.
The argument continued, Cock's and his party were
not yet members of the congregation because they
hadn't yet accepted the pattern of discipline.
And there was a meeting at which it
was seriously questioned whether they ought to be
admitted since it looked as if they were
going to be a destructive insult.
Knox very generously pleaded that they should be
admitted to the congregation, provided they would accept
its order.
And so they were admitted.
And they repaid Knox's generosity, I'm sorry to
say, by going to the magistrate telling them
that Knox was a seditious character and suggesting
to them that they should ask Knox to
leave the city as being a seditious person.
And he was asked to leave the city
and he had to go.
So in the battle of the, what was
called the battle of the Knoxians against the
Cock'sians, the Cock'sians won out.
And in Frank's book they established the second
prayer book of Edward VI, almost unchanged.
Interestingly they made the whole church subscribe to
42 articles, Cranmer's original version of the present
Anglican 39.
They did, to be sure, set up a
pattern of order which was more like the
Continental Reformed pattern than the inherited English one.
They had a congregation of two ministers, four
lay elders the prayer book hadn't been provided
for lay elders but the congregation had one,
four lay elders, also some elected deacons, and
they dropped some of the ceremonies of the
prayer book, like private baptism, confirmation, the keeping
of faith days, the wearing of the surplice,
kneeling at communion, and the using of the
sign of the cross.
But still, their way of doing things was
more like the taste of the Reformed English
church from which they'd come than the original
Frankfurt liturgy would have been.
So there it was.
Whittingham and a number of the others who
felt that really this was to substitute inadequate
worship for the ideal sort of worship, they
left Frankfurt and some of them went to
Basel and others of them went to Geneva.
And in 1559 those who'd been to Basel
and Geneva came back to England, resolved, perhaps
resolved all the more strongly because of this
dispute, to do everything they could to ensure
that a pattern corresponding to that of the
best Reformed churches in the Swiss townships was
established as the pattern of worship in England.
What's the significance of this little story?
Nelson describes it as a clash between nationalism
and internationalism.
That is, between Englishness and a willingness to
go the way that Europeans were going.
Well, that isn't wholly wrong, but it's much
too secular a way of describing it.
A better way to describe the contrast would
be to think of it as a contrast
between national solidarity and Reformed solidarity.
This was, you see, was ecstatically a religious
and a theological question and it was a
question of whether the English Christian pattern should
have precedence over the continental Swiss Reformed Christian
pattern.
The Puritans were later to think that solidarity
with the other Reformed churches of Christendom was
more desirable than adherence to the pattern which
had been set up by those who, or
credited to them had gone to the stake
rather than deny their faith.
They did in fact believe that more reformation
of the 1552 pattern was desirable.
And when later Elizabeth restored the 1552 pattern
almost unchanged they campaigned for it.
And that became one of the big issues
in Puritanism for many decades following Elizabeth's accession
to the throne.
Well, there's another element in the Puritan heritage.
Pastoral concern as exemplified particularly in Hooper concerns
the conformity to the pattern set by the
best Reformed churches as exemplified by at any
rate one of the parties who got into
trouble at Frankfurt.
And now we move to the final element
in the making of the distinctive Puritan tradition
and this is the legacy of John Fox.
Are there any questions let me ask about
the troubles of Frankfurt before we move on
to John Fox?
I'm not sure I see how exactly the
problems in Frankfurt influenced the Puritan proposal, but
Puritanism had reflected the problems in Frankfurt.
Well, the influence was simply this, that the
wishing of parties who had been foiled in
their ideal of something more Reformed than the
1552 prayer book came back to England in
1559 and went on campaigning for what they
wanted.
And they were the first people, you see,
to lead this campaign in England after the
Elizabethan restoration the Elizabethan settlement for an altered
form of worship.
Abolishing the serfdom, abolishing the sermonist, abolishing the
responsive abolishing some of the things which compelled
or some of the things which were held
to crown the sermonance and so on in
favour of something comparable to what the other
Reformed churches were using.
That is the point.
In other words, the Carthaginians won out of
Frankfurt, but actually Whittingham won out in England.
No, no, he didn't.
He lost in England too.
The Puritans never won out in their campaign
for a church modeled on Geneva and Zurich.
Not at any stage.
That's the history that we're going to study
and that we're going to start up in
this next lecture.
But they spent the whole of Elizabeth's reign
and the first 40 years of the 17th
century campaigning for it.
And this was a regular element of the
Puritan pastoral.
And, you see, the convictions on this point
were to lead them into constant non-conformity
so far as the prayer book was concerned.
Particular things that the prayer book prescribed they
wouldn't do and so they got themselves into
trouble.
They ended up in the Ecclesiastical Court.
Let us say that there wasn't church discipline
in the Reformed Church of England after 1558.
There was, and it was used against the
Puritans.
Many of them were deprived of their living.
And this is a major element in the
Puritan story.
That's why I am focused on it here.
Well, if the rest of you are happy
or at least not too miserable, we'll move
on to the legacy of Bob.
In the end I have actually a double
legacy.
A belief in the calling of England and
the ideal secondly the ideal of the Puritan
hero.
You know a culture by asking what's this
ideal of heroism.
You know the Puritan culture by asking what's
the Puritan ideal of the hero.
Of course the Puritans didn't talk in terms
of heroism.
They weren't sufficiently man-centered in their thinking
ever to do that.
But there were some people whom they particularly
admired and whose example they thought to follow
it's those people that I'm referring to as
the heroes.
And I'm going to suggest to you that
it was from John Fox, the meteorologist, that
the Puritan ideal of heroism the Puritan picture
of the ideal Christian man, in other words,
came to be crystallized and formulated.
Well now here are the basic facts about
John Fox.
Fox was what a clerical friend of mine
was once called a literary bloke.
I don't want to talk that language over
here, but it's got quite a different meaning
in English.
He was a literary bloke.
He was born in 1517 He went to
Oxford.
He was fellow of his college between 1539
and 1545 He was ordained in 1550 When
Mary came to the throne he went to
Frankfurt and was involved in the troubles, though
he tried to keep out of the hotter
arguments of the function of the peacemaker.
He didn't do too well.
Then he went to Basel and as a
literary bloke, as a literary bloke might be
expected to do, he got himself a job
as a proofreader for one of the Basel
publishers.
And that's how he kept himself going, because
he hadn't got any money, until the time
came to return to England.
When he came back to England in 1559,
because of the decidedly reformed character of his
views about how church order should be reformed,
he wasn't offered a job and so he
went on working in his character of a
literary bloke He laboured on a martyrology ever
since 1552 When already Protestants had had it's
martyrs, men like Tyndale and others who'd been
burned for the faith on the continent ever
since 1552, Proxford had the idea of writing
a history of the movement for reformation in
the church, starting with Wispeth and the Lallards,
going on to John Huck, who of course
was burned, and Jerome of Prague and Savonarola,
and ending up with the first of the
reformation martyrs.
When he got down to the job again
after 1555, 1559, there were of course a
lot of new martyrs to be added to
his list.
Approximately 300 had been burned in the state
under Mary, and when in 1663 he brought
out the first edition of his work, it
had not merely a huge title, but also
a huge sign.
It consisted of 1800 folio pages, and the
title was as follows I shouldn't bother to
take this down You can find it if
you really want it on Parler, the Elect
Nation page 118.
I take a deep breath and I begin
to read.
...