The fire of heresy continued to smoulder, exploding occasionally in insurrection,[477] occasionally blazing up in nobler form, when some poor seeker for the truth, groping for a vision of God in the darkness of the years which followed, found his way into that high presence through the martyr’s fire.  But substantially, the nation relapsed into obedience—­the church was reprieved for a century.  Its fall was delayed till the spirit in which it was attacked was winnowed clean of all doubtful elements—­until Protestantism had recommenced its enterprise in a desire, not for a fairer adjustment of the world’s good things, but in a desire for some deeper, truer, nobler, holier insight into the will of God.  It recommenced not under the auspices of a Wycliffe, not with the partial countenance of a government which was crossing swords with the Father of Catholic Christendom, and menacing the severance of England from the unity of the faith, but under a strong dynasty of undoubted Catholic loyalty, with the entire administrative power, secular as well as spiritual, in the hands of the episcopate.  It sprung up spontaneously, unguided, unexcited, by the vital necessity of its nature, among the masses of the nation.

Leaping over a century, I pass to the year 1525, at which time, or about which time, a society was enrolled in London calling itself “The Association of Christian Brothers."[478] It was composed of poor men, chiefly tradesmen, artisans, a few, a very few of the clergy; but it was carefully organised, it was provided with moderate funds, which were regularly audited; and its paid agents went up and down the country carrying Testaments and tracts with them, and enrolling in the order all persons who dared to risk their lives in such a cause.  The harvest had been long ripening.  The records of the bishops’ courts[479] are filled from the beginning of the century with accounts of prosecutions for heresy—­with prosecutions, that is, of men and women to whom the masses, the pilgrimages, the indulgences, the pardons, the effete paraphernalia of the establishment, had become intolerable; who had risen up in blind resistance, and had declared, with passionate anger, that whatever was the truth, all this was falsehood.  The bishops had not been idle; they had plied their busy tasks with stake and prison, and victim after victim had been executed with more than necessary cruelty.  But it was all in vain:  punishment only multiplied offenders, and “the reek” of the martyrs, as was said when Patrick Hamilton was burnt at St. Andrews, “infected all that it did blow upon."[480]

There were no teachers, however, there were no books, no unity of conviction, only a confused refusal to believe in lies.  Copies of Wycliffe’s Bible remained, which parties here and there, under death penalties if detected, met to read;[481] copies, also, of some of his tracts[482] were extant; but they were unprinted transcripts, most rare and precious, which the watchfulness of the police made it impossible to multiply through the press, and which remained therefore necessarily in the possession of but a few fortunate persons.