Sketch of the Reformation in England

The Reformation is not to be regarded as a great and sudden event which took the nation by surprise. It was merely the crisis to which things had been tending for some centuries; and if the fire did at last run over the country with wonderful rapidity, it was because the trees were all dry. It is a mistake to suppose that whilst the Roman catholic religion prevailed all was unity. True it is, that the elements of discontent were as yet working for the most part under ground, but they were not on that account the less likely to make themselves eventually felt. The strong man armed was keeping the house, and therefore his goods were at peace; but he was in jeopardy long before he was spoiled. Luther was the match that produced the explosion, but the train had been laid by the events of generations before him.

It may not then be the least useful, nor, perhaps, the least interesting portion of a History of the Reformation in England, to trace some of the causes that led to it; some of the incidents that made it practicable, and some of the abuses that rendered it necessary. And here there is no need to conceal the obligations we were under in the first instance to the church of Rome. Neither Gregory himself, nor Augustin his messenger, appears to have been influenced by any other than a truly Christian spirit in seeking the conversion of England, then no very tempting prize; and though there can be no doubt that Christianity had been introduced into this island much earlier, whether by any of the apostles themselves; whether after the persecution on the death of Stephen, by some of the Syrian Christians, “who were scattered abroad, and went every where preaching the word;” or whether by devout soldiers of the same nation, whom the famine foretold by Agabus might have driven into the armies of Claudius, and who might have come with him into Britain; or whether by some of the Jewish converts dispersed over the world, when that same emperor “commanded all Jews to depart from Rome;”—whether from these or from other sources unknown to us, England was in some degree Christianised, the existence of a British church before the arrival of Augustin in the year 597 is a fact clearly established. Its independent origin is sufficiently attested by the subjects of controversy between the Anglo-Roman and British Christians; the time of Easter, in which the Britons followed, as they said, St. John and the eastern Christians, a point of heterodoxy, it may be observed, in which the Irish also concurred, who in some other respects accorded with the British church, building their places of worship, for instance, with wood, and thatching them with reeds; the tonsure, whether it should be that of Peter or Paul, or none whatever; the rite of Baptism, with regard to which, however, the nature of the difference between the churches does not appear, though a difference there was, and the same may be said of the celibacy of the clergy.