A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2

A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 - Third edition, Revised and Expanded, in two volumes

While France was thus passing from general fanaticism to a large measure of freethought, England was passing by a less tempestuous path to a hardly less advanced stage of opinion. It was indeed a bloody age; and in 1535 we have record of nineteen men and five women of Holland, apparently Anabaptists, who denied the humanity of Christ and rejected infant baptism and transubstantiation, being sentenced to be burned alivetwo suffering at Smithfield, and the rest at other towns, by way of example. Others in Henrys reign suffered the same penalty for the same offence; and in 1538 a priest named Nicholson or Lambert, refusing on the Kings personal pressure to recant, was brent in Smithfield for denying the bodily presence in the eucharist.1 The first decades of Reformation in England truly saw the opening of new vials of blood. More and Fisher and scores of lesser men died as Catholics for denying the Kings supremacy in religion; as many more for denying the Catholic tenets which the King held to the last; and not a few by the consent of More and Fisher for translating or circulating the sacred books. Latimer, martyred under Mary, had applauded the burning of the Anabaptists. One generation slew for denial of the humanity of Christ; the next for denial of his divinity. Under Edward VI there were burned no Catholics, but several heretics, including Joan Bocher and a Dutch Unitarian, George Van Pare, described as a man of saintly life.2 Still the English evolution was less destructive than the French or the German, and the comparative bloodlessness of the strife between Protestant and Catholic under Mary3 and Elizabeth, the treatment [2]of the Jesuit propaganda under the latter queen as a political rather than a doctrinal question,4 prevented any such vehemence of recoil from religious ideals as took place in France. When in 1575 the law De hretico comburendo, which had slept for seventeen years, was set to work anew under Elizabeth, the first victims were Dutch Anabaptists. Of a congregation of them at Aldgate, twenty-seven were imprisoned, of whom ten were burned, and the rest deported. Two others, John Wielmacker and Hendrich Ter Woort, were anti-Trinitarians, and were burned accordingly. Foxe appealed to the Queen to appoint any punishment short of death, or even that of hanging, rather than the horrible death by burning; but in vain. All parties at the time concurred in approving the course taken.5 Orthodoxy was rampant. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 52160
Author: Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Release Date: May 25, 2016
Format: eBook
Language: English