It is well to pause and look for a moment at this small band of heroes; for heroes they were, if ever men deserved the name.  Unlike the first reformers who had followed Wycliffe, they had no earthly object, emphatically none; and equally unlike them, perhaps, because they had no earthly object, they were all, as I have said, poor men—­either students, like Tyndal, or artisans and labourers who worked for their own bread, and in tough contact with reality, had learnt better than the great and the educated the difference between truth and lies.  Wycliffe had royal dukes and noblemen for his supporters—­knights and divines among his disciples—­a king and a House of Commons looking upon him, not without favour.  The first Protestants of the sixteenth century had for their king the champion of Holy Church, who had broken a lance with Luther; and spiritual rulers over them alike powerful and imbecile, whose highest conception of Christian virtue was the destruction of those who disobeyed their mandates.  The masses of the people were indifferent to a cause which promised them no material advantage; and the Commons of Parliament, while contending with the abuses of the spiritual authorities, were laboriously anxious to wash their hands of heterodoxy.  “In the crime of heresy, thanked be God,” said the bishops in 1529, “there hath no notable person fallen in our time;” no chief priest, chief ruler, or learned Pharisee—­not one.  “Truth it is that certain apostate friars and monks, lewd priests, bankrupt merchants, vagabonds and lewd idle fellows of corrupt nature, have embraced the abominable and erroneous opinions lately sprung in Germany, and by them have been some seduced in simplicity and ignorance.  Against these, if judgment have been exercised according to the laws of the realm, we be without blame.  If we have been too remiss or slack, we shall gladly do our duty from henceforth."[489] Such were the first Protestants in the eyes of their superiors.  On one side was wealth, rank, dignity, the weight of authority, the majority of numbers, the prestige of centuries; here too were the phantom legions of superstition and cowardice; and here were all the worthier influences so pre-eminently English, which lead wise men to shrink from change, and to cling to things established, so long as one stone of them remains upon another, This was the army of conservatism.  Opposed to it were a little band of enthusiasts, armed only with truth and fearlessness; “weak things of the world,” about to do battle in God’s name; and it was to be seen whether God or the world was the stronger.  They were armed, I say, with the truth.  It was that alone which could have given them victory in so unequal a struggle.  They had returned to the essential fountain of life; they re-asserted the principle which has lain at the root of all religions, whatever their name or outward form, which once burnt with divine lustre in that Catholicism which was now to pass away; the fundamental axiom of all real life, that the service which man owes to God is not the service of words or magic forms, or ceremonies or opinions; but the service of holiness, of purity, of obedience to the everlasting laws of duty.