Page:The Church of England, its catholicity and continuity.djvu/116

100 his followers were in a true sense forerunners of the Puritans. His object was to build up a religion, as gathered from the pages of the Bible, to oppose the teaching of Rome. The Lollards and the Wycliffe preachers desired to make every boy at the plough acquainted with the sacred pages. For the true origin of the Puritans, however, we must not look to England but to the Continent. At the beginning of the fifteenth century a great change passed over the history of religion there, especially in Germany and Switzerland. In Germany, Luther, who was born at Eisleben, 1483, began to oppose the claims and teaching of Rome. Tetzel came to Würtemberg to sell indulgences. This led this great reformer to expose their iniquity. His attack on one Roman doctrine led to his denouncing many others, until at last he found himself an excommunicated heretic. But Luther cared little for this as long as he had the Bible to which he could appeal. The movement which Luther started was taken up by other men. In Switzerland, Calvin and Zwingli became heads of parties. They also acknowledged the Bible as the authority of their teaching. These three reformers, however, arrived at very different conclusions respecting the meaning of Holy Scripture. But what have these facts to do with the history of Puritans in England? The answer to this I will give you now. Men who came under the influence of these reformers arrived in England even as early as the reign of Henry VIII., and brought over their teaching with them, and later on became a strong party here. In the reign of Mary, hundreds of our ancestors fled to the Continent to escape persecution, and fell in love with the reformers' teaching; and when peace was restored, and Elizabeth ascended