The Legacy of John Hooper and John Fox — J.I. Packer

Tyndale, Bradford, and the Puritan Point of View

We began yesterday to talk about the text which went to the making of the distinctive Puritan point of view. And I spoke first of the legacy of Tyndale, which I analysed as, first, the thought of the lordship of the Bible, and second, the thought of a justified man in covenant with God.

And then secondly, I looked at the legacy of Bradford, which I defined as a priority of repentance, preached, written about, lived out. I described to you from all sources something of the rule, the rule of life that Bradford made to himself with regard 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 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 because they don't get in.

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.

That 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 we've got to go on how they're to be reapplied to ourselves today.

Well I told you about Bradford because here you've got a priorly 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 letters 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.

However, 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 will hear more of them before very long. Here then is the legacy of Bradford. A piety of repentance, lived out, preached, written about.

Hooper's Passion for Pastoral Care and Reformed Church Order

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 reformed order. And I thought it was most helpful, therefore, to lump these two together under the same name heading.

John Hooper's Protestant Convictions and Ministry

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 Zingley 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, for that's how it was for a pewter sovereign. He said what Parliament was to pass, and Parliament passed it.

He carries through Parliament then the so-called Acts of the Sixth Articles, 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 Articles came out, Hooper, whose doctrine of the sacraments was firmly a whip, Zingley and 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 he 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, As we would say in 1967 England, I don't know if you say it in 1967 America, to tear scripts off people.

And we know because we got the texts of his lectures that he actually did tear scripts off people. And denounced ungodliness from some of the courtiers to the penitents and holy living in no mealy-mouthed tone.

So that's the kind of man he was. And in London, at this time, his closest friend was John Alasdair. Whose name you may know, he was a Polish nobleman, who had at one time been ordained as become Archbishop of Warsaw.

But then he'd become a convinced civilian, Swiss in his doctrine. He'd moved to Emden as Superintendent Minister of the Reformed Churches in Friesland. 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 Strangers' Church, a large congregation in London which had four other ministers besides Alaska. And it was a church organized 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 in each of the two services, and a preaching service in the week, and a monthly communion preceded by discipline, that is, the exalination of intending 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 Strangers' Church in London. These were all things which fired Hooper's imagination and seemed to him to be ideal.

Hooper's Conflict over Episcopal Vestments

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 bishopry. He had to swear an oath of supremacy to the sovereign by God and the saints. He didn't object to the thought of the sovereign's supremacy, but he did object to swearing by the saints.

Equally, he had to be consecrated in traditional medieval episcopal vestments. That is, a white rupture, as this was called, R-O-P-H-E-T, as a sort of fancy surface, with a scarlet chenille, C-H-I-N-E-R-E, that the gown the bishops wore then still wear, as a matter of fact, over their surface, with a good deal of red in it.

There is a still official Anglican episcopal dress, ruptured and chenille. One never wearing it as 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 outspokenness 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 judgment had been wrong and that these clerical clothes were, in fact, matters of indifference, and they didn't, therefore, impose any real obstacle or conscience upon Hooper, an obstacle, I mean, that would stop him from accepting this bishopry.

And so, in 1551, he was released from prison and was given a consecrated bishop, wearing the offending 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 a moment nobody must expect that he would.

So, whenever you think of Hooper's judgments on this particular issue, you can see purism, scripturalism, coming through. And 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 scriptural precept.

Hooper's Questionnaire and the Need for Clerical Formation

Now, when he got to his diocese, he showed himself to be a man with a true pastor's heart. Here's just one or two facts 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 one, how many commandments are there? Question two, where are they to be sung?

Question three, repeat them. Question four, what are the articles of the Christian faith? That meant the Creed. Repeat them. That's five, and question six, prove them from scripture. Repeat the Lord's Prayer.

Eight, how do you know it is the Lord? Nine, where is it to be sung? 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 notation 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 30 years of this history.

In country areas, not merely in England, but 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 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, prompted them to rise.

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'll 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 fulfill a better ministry.

Another testimony to his quality as a Dorothy 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's rubbed through the court records of Dr. Dorothy, 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 daily manifests, 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 on Sunday.

So you see, those he met 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 to 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 Suffering, 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.

The Frankfurt Exiles and Reformed Church Order

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 Troubles 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 Troubles.

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 these troubles, there were eleven future bishops, five future deans, fox, an archaeologist, and at least one of Queen Elizabeth's future privy counsellors, as well as some other men of lesser nobility.

But it is a story. In 1564, 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 magistrates for the party of exiles to use the Church of the White Ladies, as this 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 Valeron Poulin, P-O-U-L-L-A-I-N, at the weaving centre of Black Sunbury and Somerset.

And this congregation had set up there in the days of Edward VI. And they'd already come to Frankfurt, and they were worshipping regularly in the Church of the White Ladies, and it was meant for them for that purpose.

And the magistrates 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.

The order, modelled on the Calvin's, the Zurich and Alaska's order, was drawn up. There were no scriptures 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 Alaskan 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 a full church life which the Frankfort community had.

Undoubtedly, Whittingham and his friends had as part of their motive 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 a 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 and dignitaries who had stayed at home in England under Mary, and were even at that time being sent one after another to the stake. 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 judgement 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 perhaps be a little bit more like the prayer book. 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 I believe 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 litany 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's 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 Peter Cox's deal by making remarks like this the argument continued Cox 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 disruptive influence 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 Coxians the Coxians won out and in Frank's book they established the second prayer book of Edward VI, almost unchanged. Interestingly they made the whole church prescribe the 42 articles from the 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 provided for lay elders, but the Franksburg congregation had one four lay elders officers and 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 surface, kneeling at communion and the using of the sign of the cross.

But still, their way of doing things was more like the faith 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 in 1559.

Those who'd been to Basel and Geneva came back to England 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 that is, the churches in the Swiss townships was established as the pattern of worship in England.

Theological Significance of the Frankfurt Troubles

What's the significance of this little story? Nathan 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 speak of it as a contrast between national solidarity and reformed solidarity.

This was, you see, technically 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.

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.

So there's another element in the Puritan heritage pastoral concern, as identified particularly in Hooper concerns are 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 at Frankfurt before we move on to John Fox. I'm not sure. I see how exactly the problems in Frankfurt influenced the Puritan proposal or Puritanism that reflected the problems in Frankfurt.

Well the influence was this that the Whittingham party 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 to lead this campaign in England after the Elizabethan restoration, the Elizabethan settlement for an altered form of worship abolishing the service, abolishing the ceremonies, abolishing the responses abolishing some of the things which compelled, or some of the things which were held to crowd the ceremonies 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 at Frankfurt but actually Whittingham won out in England.

No he didn't, he lost in England too the Puritans never won out in their campaign for a church which modelled on Geneva and Zurich not at any stage, that's the history that we're going to study, well we're going to start off in this next lecture but they spent the whole of Elizabeth reign and the first 40 years of the 17th century campaigning for it and this was a regular element of the Puritan platform 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.

John Fox and the Puritan Ideal of Christian Heroism

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 thought which again I have to be 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 sought 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 who was an archaeologist 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. John Fox, a clerical friend of mine was once called a literary bloke. I don't know whether you talk that language over here but it's got quite a definite meaning in England.

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 presumption of a peacemaker.

He didn't do too well. Then he went to Basel and 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 a 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 1562 when already Protestantism had its martyrs men like Tyldale and others who'd been burned for the faith on the continent ever since 1562 Foxton had the idea of writing a history of the movement for reformation in the church starting with Wichita and Ballala going on to John Hutt and ending up with the first of the reformation martyrs.

When he got down to the job again after 1559 there were of course a lot of new martyrs to be added to his list. Approximately 300 had been burned in the faith 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 size.

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 parlour, the elect nation, page 118. I take a deep breath and I begin to read Facts and monuments of these latter and perilous days touching matters of the church wherein are comprehended and described the great persecutions and horrible troubles that have been wrought and practised by the Romish prince especially in this realm of England and Scotland from the year of our Lord a thousand under the time now present gathered and collected according to the true copies and writings certificates and one of the fastest of bills that suffered as also out of the bishop's registers which were the doers thereof by John Fox.

Now it ought to be said lest you laugh immoderately at this that this was before the days of dust covers and before therefore the days of publishers blurred and publishers exalted authors quite obviously to produce elaborate title pages which in fact would function as blurbs and tell the man who just read the title page everything that the book was about.

But there are other books of this mid -16th century period which suffered in exactly the same way from bloated title pages. Indeed, here's just a little byway of information if they interest you it's at least possible.

Some people think it's probable that the title page of the first edition of Calvin's Institute was a publisher's blurb rather than a statement of Calvin himself because the book announced itself and you remember it was only a little pocket book in those days it's 200 pages, big enough to slip into your pocket.

Institutio Religiones Christiana I can't go on and do it all in Latin but the substance of the title is Institute of the Christian Religion containing all the sum and substance of Christianity and everything that a Christian needs to know to his soul's health.

And in the second edition of the Institute the title page reads the Institute of the Christian Religion. And then all this stuff again, I can't remember the Latin but the final phrase is now at last answering to its title which sounds suspiciously as if Calvin had rather a bad conscience about the excessive claims made to this little book by the publisher who wrote the title page who wrote the title page of it but insisted on writing the title page for the second edition itself in order to keep the record straight and foul his scholar's conscience.

This may or may not be so but it's certainly rather an odd thing and this is as good an explanation of it as you can give anyway, whether that's right or wrong. The fact is that this great long title of Fox's 1800 page book is title and blurb all in one.

And now that I've read it to you, you know what the book was about. I needn't tell you any more of what the book was about. It immediately became a best-seller. The narratives, which in fact are very well done there are minor inaccuracies, of course even in 20th century historians you sometimes find minor inaccuracies but they're only minor inaccuracies.

And the narratives of the Marian marches are told with great sobriety and restraint. And the events, well, they speak for themselves most powerfully simply as narratives of servants of Christ faithful unto death in an unreasonable, cruel, unprincipled persecution.

The Roman position, of course, were not so impressed by the book. Harding, the opponent of Bishop Sewell they had a long, elaborate controversy about the rightness and wrongness of the Anglican establishment.

Harding, in an aside, referred to Fox's book in the phrase, the huge dungeon of your sinking marches. The Protestants regarded it differently and the book sold well, despite its size. And in 1570 there was a new edition two folio volumes this time 2 ,300 pages.

Fox's Book and the Puritan Calling of England

Well, 1570 was just a good time to bring it out because the actual monument leads up to the accession of Elizabeth. The accession of Elizabeth and the expression at the end of the confidence that Elizabeth has been raised up by God to lead the Church of England and the English people into the fullness of reformation and with it the joy and peace and blessing which God may be expected to give to those people who fully honour him.

And earlier, early in the year 1570, Elizabeth would be next communicated by the Pope. And there was a revolt of the Catholic earls gathering in the north of England just at this time, Fox's act, the monument came out and immediately an order in council said that this book was to be displayed in churches up and down the land.

This was part of the authoritative history of the English Church. But you see, it wasn't from whatever else it was. It was a tremendous apologia for the reformation marches and for the position for which they stood.

What was the significance of Fox's book of marches. At least, I suppose, I shouldn't really call it that Fox's book of marches is a name that has only ever been given to a breach of the act, the monument.

There have been a number of them, the first of them were made at the end of the 18th century. They simply focused on the story of the reformation marches and cut out most of the material which went before.

Also they cut out a lot of the documents which Fox gave relating to the death of the marchers. He gave elaborate transcripts of their examinations when they were convicted of heresy and that sort of thing.

Well if you ever see Fox's book of marches you'll find that it's been shortened by cutting out a great deal of that sort of material. So with strict historical accuracy you shouldn't refer to Fox's work as a whole by that name.