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Chapter 14—Toward the Reign of Edward VI, 1547-1553, pages 221-247
Prof. Daniell’s discussion entails the following elements: (1) directions for a reformation brewing since 1528, (2) Anglo-Roman-Italian reversals of reforms, (3) Edward VI, (4) Old Testament kings, (5) Monarchs and the “Two Regiments” (spirituals and temporals), (6) Edward VI as Josiah, (7) the enriching effects of Josiah, (8) those English Bibles again, and (9) contrary to Romanist and Tractarian historians (airbrush artists), the English Reformation was not a failure.
As the discussion develops towards Edward VI, 1547-1553, it should not be forgotten that Tyndale’s NTs, notwithstanding repressive English efforts, were still rolling off Continental presses. Furthermore, there were no further significant translation-tweaks to the Great Bible of 1540 until the efforts on the Geneva Bible, beginning in 1557 and going to the press in 1560, a reproduction with slight annotations. The Geneva Bible (1560, 1576, 1599), notwithstanding historical revisionists (airbrush artists), was an influential Bible in England for 100 years and, then, it reached the “creeks and coastal plains of America” (221); the Geneva Bible was a rich source book for personal and private lives. As said before, the toothpaste was not going back into the tube.
DIRECTIONS THAT THE REFORMATION SHOULD TAKE, c. 1528, pages 221-226
Tyndale was forward-looking. One strong clue comes from Tyndale’s printer, at one moment under the influence of alcohol. Tyndale had Miles Coverdale and the Observant friar William Roy as assistants in translation work. Peter Quesnell, an eminent publisher who would print any respectable volume of any persuasion, including Tyndale, took to too much wine. He had been drinking too much. “Under the influence” Quesnell told Cochlaeus (John Dobneck), a vitriolic and virulent anti-Lutheran in search of heretics...Quesnell revealed “the secret by which England was to be brought over to the side of Luther” (143). That was red-meat; it still is red-meat to Tractarians and even liberals. The Bible and Bible doctrines were vital and Tyndale knew it, like Luther. While Anglo-Italian leaders were fighting brushfires in the 1520s in England (e.g. Bp. John Fisher and Henry VIII), notably in London, Cambridge and Oxford, Tyndale was hovering over, digging in, thinking about, and being controlled by the constant inrush, overflow and immersion in the Biblical text. That begins to shape doctrine, worship and piety. Tyndale was miles beyond the imaginative powers of the majorities of Anglo-Italian leaders. An English Bible in the nation would force far too many--again, far too many--unappreciated, probing, penetrating—and even mocking—questions of the corrupted Anglo-Italian leaders literally “hell-bent” on control and darkness.
Many examples could be cited. A discussion of good and bad kings with applications to Popes, Bishops and Kings could invite unpleasant conflicts. Or, more simply, a little matter: WHAT? Married clergymen like the apostles? 1 Cor. 9.5? As one sheriff in one shire said upon reading that, “What? The Bible is heresy.” These are two, but there are far, far more. The power of the whole Bible, God’s Word, was feared; it still is; that’s why we get “driplet-droplet” theologies of Marcionism, continuing Romanism (masters of the selective quotation system with centuries of practice), liberalism, and modern day evangelicalism (think shallow music, liturgy and more).
Tyndale (like Cranmer later) saw the “power of the Scripture” (122). Few understand Cranmer's childlike and implicit power in the unvarnished reading of the Scriptures. This point about Cranmer rarely gets mentioned. Luther had the same conviction.
This applied to Kings (and Pope’s) as well, still a revolutionary message...the relationship to the rank-and-file governed by Scripture. One doesn't get the right to abuse Christ's sheep. Here’s Tyndale:
“…the people are God’s, and not theirs: yeah, are Christ’s inheritance and possession, bought with His blood. The most despised person in the realm is the king’s brother and fellow-member with him in the kingdom of God and of Christ” (222).
Hiding, stealing and obfuscating “the Word of God” was a constant theme of all Reformers. Notwithstanding all Thomas More's intemperate chest-pounding in strenuous opposition to English Bibles (and John Fishers and other Anglo-Roman-
Italians), again, from Tyndale:
“Judge whether it be possible that any good come out of their dumb ceremonies and sacraments unto thy soul. Judge their penance, pilgrimages, pardons, purgatory, praying to posts, dumb blessings, dumb absolutions, their dumb pattering, and howling, their dumb strange holy gestures, with all their dumb disguisings, their satisfactions and justifyings” (223).
“Dumb” means Latin throughout.
It’s worth re-reading the quote slowly. Tyndale has the indubitably clear sense that Latin-illiterate throngs faced “dumbness” from the Anglo-Italian imperialists.
“Dumbness” was sought, advocated and defended.
What good comes of that "dumbness" asked Tyndale? Ignorance was the name of the game. It kept the "swine" from "trodding the Gospel underfoot" to quote one Anglo-Roman-Italian.
Forcing such ignorance, dumbness and theft of God’s Word was, to Tyndale, the act of antichrists. His marginal note at 1 John 2.1 indicates such—antichrists. “…even now there are many antichrists come already” as Tyndale translates it. He lays into the money-schemes of Rome including the enormously wealthy English monasteries. Modern ecumenists cannot handle such an idea of an antichrist in religious leadership, or the Devil, or demons or humans in enslaved bondage to them (airbrush Eph. 2.1, John 8.44, Mt. 13 out of the text for example); that is beyond their ken, too rude...too un-Western and too un-advanced. It's not fit for country-club Republicans or modern professors of literature, history and theology. Not so for Tyndale.
The “dumbness” would be cured by English Bibles. Again, Tyndale was immersed in the text.
On the simplest and even more complex levels of Bible reading...rude, probing and awakening questions would indicate greed, pomp, avarice, power-grabbing, arrogance, wealth, theft, anger and more—even architecturally with penance-indulgence funds—dem' big bucks—underwriting construction-artistic developments at (Anti-) St. Peter’s in Rome. The Bible would expose such things (a Wycliffite theme). Rome was running a Ponzi-scheme, Peter's pence and all, like TBN. Those rude observations by St. Paul about leaders not being covetous for wealth were unwelcomed notes. Calvin would call it "fleecing the sheep." Luther saw it with the indulgence trafficking.
On the simple or more complex reading of the Bible, Tyndale is also scathing about Anglo-Italian liturgical superstitions and power-abuses (still a feature with Tractoes, liturgical martinets and fundamentalists, "righta' lefta' right").
Again, from Tyndale:
“If any of them happen to swallow his spittle, or any of the water wherewith he washeth his mouth, ere he go to mass: or touch the sacrament with his nose: or if the ass [ = Tyndale’s word for priest, emphasis added] forget to breathe on him [Tyndale’s meaning the bread or the chalice], or happen to handle it with any of his fingers which are not anointed, or say Alleluia instead of Laus tibi Domine or Ite missa est instead of Benedictamus Domino or pour too much wine in the chalice, or read the gospel without light, or make not his crosses aright, how trembleth he! How feareth he! What an horrible sin is committed! I cry God mercy, saith he, and you my ghostly father. But to hold an whore, or another man’s wife, to buy a benefice, to set one realm at variance with another, and to cause twenty thousand men to die on one day, is but a trifle and a pastime with them” (224).
Or, on Anglo-Italian arrogance...the desires to inflict ignorance on the people (Latin services on the Latin illiterate throngs), and anti-Pauline theology, again from Tyndale:
“What then saith the pope? What care I for Paul? I command by virtue of obedience to read the gospel in Latin. Let them no pray but in Latin, no, not their Pater noster. If any be sick, go also and say them a gospel, and all in Latin…It is verily as good to preach it to swine as to men if thou preach it in a tongue they understand not. How shall I believe the truth and promises which God hath sworn, while thou tellest them unto me in a tongue which I understand not” (225)?
Or, again, on a simple or complex reading of the entire Bible, a simple person could easily discern world-consuming preoccupations and the unwarranted wealth relative to ministerial duties, again from Tyndale:
“To preach God’s word is too much for half a man: and to minister a temporal kingdom is too much for half a man also. Either other requireth an whole man. One therefore cannot well do both. He that avengeth himself on every trifle is not meet to preach the patience of Christ...He that is overwhelmed with all manner riches and doth but seek more daily not meet to preach poverty…” (226).
There are many themes—including theological ones, like Romans—that Bible reading would confront. Where's purgatory or indulgences? Tyndale frequently noted: "...the pope sells what Christ gives freely."
Upon a simple or complex reading of Scriptures, one very simple theme was married clerks in collision with the authority of the Anglo-Italians and Continental Papists legislating mandatory celibacy; the Papists still require it. A simple reading must deal with such. It illustrates the continued arrogance of the senior clerk in Rome. Again, from Tyndale on marriage:
“He must have a wife for two causes. One, that it may thereby be known who is meet for the room. He is apt for so chargeable an office, which had never household to rule. Another cause is that chastity is an exceeding seldom gift, and unchastity exceeding perilous for that degree [position], inasmuch as the people look as well unto living as unto the preaching, and are hurt at once if the living disagree, and fall from the faith, and believe not the word” (226).
Married clergy were shockers to (some) Elizabethans. Even Elizabeth, rather un-Reformed on this point, was still in the Romanist grip of her past; she acquiesced for peace, but still did not like married clerks including Mrs. Grindal, the wife of the second Canterbury working for her.
UNDOING REFORMS, 226-229
As the monasteries were being dissolved, Bibles were going into the parishes of England. A “Bishops’ Book” in 1537 was published in great numbers. There were also Anglo-Italian works from the press, e.g. The Institution of Christian Men, expounding the 7 sacraments, Lord’s Prayer, Ave Maria, purgatory, papal authority and Rome’s definition of justification. It was a counter-reformation move. But, these volumes were in English...itself a shift, itself an indication of the need to counter growing sympathies for reform.
The Parliamentary Act, 1539, of "Six Articles" was a “weighty counter-move back to Rome” (227). The Jesuits had formed-up to support the senior clerk in Rome “against heresy.” The Articles were to be enforced “upon pain of death.”
We ask, quite vigorously, where was Canterbury Cranmer? Was this one of those points where he capitulated? Cranmer hid his wife and kept his position, Latimer resigned his see, and Coverdale fled.
Robert Barnes burned at Smithfield on 30 JUL 1540.
"The Six Articles" asserted: transubstantiation, communion in one kind, mandatory celibacy, necessity of monastic vows (unbreakable including vows of chastity and allegiance to the senior clerk in Rome), private and propitiatory masses for the departed, and mandatory auricular confession. The Anglo-Italians were on the move and the “power was shifting” (227).
Other Anglo-Italian moves:
1. Publication of the King’s Book
2. Publication of The Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian Man, both of these volumes supported in 1543 by the Parliament. This volume was for the “advancement of true religion and for the abolishment of the contrary,” making it a crime for any “unlicensed person” to “read the Bible to himself or others” (227).
It proscribed “the crafty, false and untrue translation of Tyndale” although it was embedded in the Great Bible--a laughable fact. A monumental absurdity.
By 1540, the 1526 NT by Tyndale, the 1534 NT by Tyndale, ½ of the OT by Tyndale, Coverdale’s 1535 of the entire Bible, Coverdale’s minor tweaks of the 1537 Thomas Matthew’s Bible (Coverdale but renamed as a screen) and the Great Bible (again, by incorporation, containing the previous works) was going to 9000 parishes. Henry and the Parliament were acting with monumental absurdity and incoherence.
3. But, these moves were blows to the German Lutherans who had, increasingly, looked to Henry VIII to lead a “united Protestant front” against Anglo-Romanism and Romanism. Cranmer and even Tunstall had entertained 3 German reformer-delegates at Lambeth for 1 year. "The Six Articles" and government's counter-reformation moves ended the effort.
4. Yet, Henry VIII issued his Proclamation to “set up the largest and greatest Bible in every church” with the admonition to “avoid contention and altercation” (228).
5. An effort in 1542 to revise the Great Bible in the direction of greater Latinity came to nothing. For example, the great opponent of the English translations was Stephen Gardiner of Winchester (remember his running interference for the Pope in Paris while Coverdale was working on print-runs); if you couldn’t win on English Bibles, you could blow smoke and obfuscate; old Steve imported 132 odd-ballish words at key points: commilitio, lites, panis propositiones, digragma, ejicere, increpari, zizania, and a 100 more. Or, in the baptism of Christ, this gem for the lay-swine: “…this is my dilect son in whom complacui…” That'll teach em!'
6. Henry VIII issued a Proclamation in 1546 that “no man or woman of what estate, condition, or degree was…to receive, have, take or keep, Tyndale’s or Coverdale’s New Testaments…” Large numbers were collected and burned at St. Paul’s by the Anglo-Italian senior clerk of London, old Bonner. All of this ran against the explicit sense of poor Cranmer’s Preface to the Great Bible.
7. But, as we’ve noted, this was all quite a howler! F.F. Bruce called Henry VIII’s Proclamation a “monumental piece of absurdity” (229). Tyndale and Coverdale were already in the Great Bible now in many parishes. But, we can imagine the “chilling effect” upon the people—the fears. "Pay and obey, but don't read or think."
8. The real issue for the Anglo-Italians: control of the Bible and shielding parishioners from pervasive involvement with the Bible. They were “driplet-droplet theologians,” then like now. Like Jesus' Parable of the Sower, the Devil "stealing" the sown seed.
KING EDWARD VI, 229-230
Henry VIII mercifully and blessedly died--like all mortals--on time in JAN 1547. "The Six Articles" were repealed. Edward VI would accede to the throne on JAN 1547. The availability of Bibles—oh oh--an upswing without Royal opposition. Soon, the 1549 Book of Common Prayer would be put forward, an advance in one sense—English services nationwide and the reversal of the Anglo-Italian policies legislating darkness and ignorance. Martin Bucer would help Cranmer towards the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. The Anglo-Italians did not disappear; they would resurface with a furious and fire-like vengeance and a definite agenda in 1553-1558.
Roman and Tractarian analyses dub the English Reformation a failure. More largely, denial also accrues by means of neglect—a strong force to this day. Academic analyses often engage: politics, selective theological themes, selective focus on some recusant parishes and church wardens’ records, selective figures—and often on the “destructive forces” or the English Reformation as a “destroyer of religion.” It is near-wise always denied that English Bibles was a major factor in the English Reformation.
THIS PROBABLY ACCOUNTS FOR THE TEC, COE, and the ACNA-Tracto efforts at obfuscation, revision and denial. Prof. Daniell’s said new and scholarly efforts are needed in modern times to answer the rages of neglect and denial
Laying blame at the feet of Romanist and Anglo-Italian (Tractarian) historians, Diarmaid MacCulloch wrote in 1999:
“A negative image of Edwardean religion has prevailed since the early nineteenth century, the result of disapproval from both Romans Catholics and (within the Church of English itself) Anglo-Catholics. The distinguished Anglo-Catholic church historian Bishop Walter Frere would speak for many when in 1910 he contemplated the six years after 1547 and dismissed them as the `lowest depths to which the English church has ever sunk’…[recent historians] have echoed that dismissal…as an unmitigated disaster imposed by alien forces, wrecking not just the beauty of the parish church but also the intricate and orderly structure of village life and the financial system which sustained it…In 1957, another prominent Anglo-Catholic, Fr Humphrey Whistler (like Frere, a member of the Community of the Resurrection) produced an engaging little pamphlet on the Reformation which was intended as an exercise in ecumenism between Roman Catholics and Anglicans, picking up the pieces of misunderstanding from the sixteen century…In this we hear one solution to the problem of the Edwardian Reformation, simply to deny it any part in the Church of England story…Fr Whistler was completely silent on the first half-century of the English Reformation” (230).
It’s just bad history-writing, agenda-driven history-writing, replete with hate, denial and hostilities, the Tractarians contribution to the late 19th and 20th centuries that still live.
Again, more from Prof. MacCulloch and the power of the Old Testament fueling Edwardean reforms:
“The rebuilt Church [under Edward] was evangelical in essence. The assignment for evangelicals was a treasure hunt for the evangelion, the good news to be found in the New Testament…Yet spokesmen for the Edwardean revolution were also drawn to the Old Testament, where they could view other kingdoms, battling against great odds to hear the message of God. Henry VIII had already enjoyed posing as one or other of the two great success stories in Israelite politics, David and Solomon. However, in the turbulence of his son’s revolution, other kings of Israel and Judah entered the stage, because they were more urgently scripted to act as a warning or encouragement” (230).
We would add that these images would be taken up by Elizabeth, James, Charles and Royal supremacists including our good friend, Billy-goat Laud of Canterbury—who never saw a sermon he couldn’t shape like a wax nose against anything Reformed.
Englishmen were reading history scripted to the OT. It was the stuff of reform.
Calvin and Luther relied on the magistrates for reforms. So did the divines of the Westminster Assembly. Elijah was a favored story of Ahab and Jezebel and their Baalite priests. Elijah put forth the mocking question, “Why halt ye between two opinions?” (an apposite question for ACNA-Bob). Now, history could read like a “tick-tock” of good and bad rulers—raising uncomfortable questions for kings. Holinshed’s Chronicles and Foxe's Acts and Monuments would be found in many Elizabethan homes—Shakespeare would draw on the former. Oh no! Could there be "bad popes," "bad kings," "bad bishops" or "bad clerks?" Who needs those questions thought the power-brokers, then, like now.
MONARCHS AND “THE TWO REGIMENTS,” 235-238
The “power of the monarch under God” played a large role with the Reformers.
Tyndale’s Obedience (1528), Practice of Prelates (1530), and his Exposition on V, VI, VII Matthew (1533) dealt with the role of the monarch as did Simon Fish’s exhilarating Supplication of Beggars (1529), a volume that charmed Henry VIII.
John Frith, Robert Barnes, John Bale and later Cranmer himself were all loyal Henricians.
There were “two regiments,” the temporals and spirituals. A new force is what we would call the "insofar clause." That is, we obey the temporals "insofar" as they do not require unlawful compliance to unbiblical issues.
Tyndale had given thought to these things.
1. On the one hand, some have seen his Obedience as a profound argument for the control of a nation’s religion by the King, or Caesaro-papism, or Erastianism. Cuius region, cuius religio. That was the order of the day for all nations, not just England.
2. On the other hand, Tyndale in his Exposition on V, VI, VII Matthew (1533) said: “…The clergy have so ruffled the temporal to the spiritual together” and have “made such confusion that no man can know the one from the other…” This had been long in the making, going backwards to Rome’s Unam Sanctum...or to Thomas a Becket's engagements with the English king...or to Charlemagne bowing his head to receive the crown...or to Constantine convoking the Nicene Council.
3. Tyndale did not know how to see them easily distinguished: “…we cannot separate them into two watertight compartments” (237).
4. Yet, for Tyndale and reformers, the King must obey the Scriptures.
5. Even early American legal textbooks abounded with Biblical references; the early New England Puritans did not easily distinguish the lines either; theonomists like the 2-stepping-REC Ray, before his more recent iteration in favor of Tractos, called for the total subjection of the temporals to the OT spirituals including Mosaic Law. Or, even the Presbyterians and the Reformed had to amend their Erastian elements in their confessions. The Covenanter Presbyterians around Pittsburg still assert Christ over crown and the Solemn League and Covenant, but we digress.
EDWARD VI AS JOSIAH AND ENRICHING EFFECTS, 238-243
Edward VI was viewed as:
1. Josiah, 2 Kings 22-23 and 2 Chron. 34-35, a young king with a “burning and growing zeal for the LORD” (239)
2. Josiah, commendably “gathering officials” for reform
3. Josiah, who “swept away corruptions” and “sacrifices to the Canaanite gods” (239).
Prof. Daniell returns and rewarms his constant theme.
But, the standard histories on Edward never mention the growing role and force of the English Bible. The historians “slight,” stand “aloof,” or treat the “Bible like an unwelcome relative glimpsed at the far end of a room” (240). Prof. Daniell’s has already identified the Romanists and Anglo-Romanists as culprits; one might wish to see an analysis of the impact of the 19th-20th century liberalism as a co-enabler in the addiction to historical revisionism; mix in some secularism and other modern forces and one gets amnesia in some sectors and denial in others.
The question still survives. The Enlightenment appealed to natural law (whatever that means as identified by fallen sinners).
Yet, having said all that, for years, decades and centuries, in England and worldwide Anglicanism, an infant grew up heard the Book of Common Prayer and the English Bible. He or she heard that throughout their years, even if the cleric was boring holes in the theology of the Bible, Prayer Book or Articles. It still goes on, for example, at King's College, Cambridge.
The question arises: how can the role of the Bible be neglected in standard and modern histories? That’s Prof. Daniell’s probing question. He continues to repeat this point.
Prof. Daniell points to two telling volumes that speak to the issue: Margaret Ashton's England’s Iconclasts, 1: Laws against Images (1988) and The King’s Bedpost (1993). In these two books, she offers historical portraits of the figures around Edward and their “use of the Old Testament kings in European Reformation documents.” She points to Elizabeth’s Book of Homilies which commended the good kings of Judah. She notes that Edward as Josiah was reading the law, restoring the nation, destroying false religion and doing the will of God by rebuilding the nation (241).
Prof. Daniell raises the Roman and Anglo-Roman (within the Church of England) complaints against those who “mourn the destruction of the great monasteries under Henry VIII” and the “cultural disaster” (242). This is the theme of the Johnny-one-notes. They sing this in varied keys. If we've heard it once, we've heard it a few dozen times. The iconclasts painted over wall paintings and put up Bible verses instead. We get it. Prof. Daniell rightly laments the scattering of Latin manuscripts to the wind; hah, they learned it, however, from the Romanists themselves, skilled in the very invective and animosities of many burnings of Bibles, books...and burnings of people too. Thomas More believed the "burnings" would purge the land. Little mention is made of the “grip of wealth,” the transfer of wealth from England to Rome, or the varied frauds perpetrated on the simple, naïve and gullible, e.g. the “blood of Christ at Hailes Abbey” to mention one. Or, the manipulation of the people through fear of purgatory or the control of the nation from Rome. Or, conversely, the flowering of a Reformation flood of culture, music, art, language, literature and high scholarship—Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and others.
ENGLISH MONARCHS AS OLD TESTAMENT KINGS, 243-244
Up to the 1660s, the Royals of the time were frequently seen as a David, most notably with Henry VIII, but also James 1 through Charles II. “David, Solomon, and Josiah were united in Edward: but so were Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, Jehu and Antiochus” (244). One scholar, commenting on the 16th century Reformer John Bale, and the view of 2 Sam. 16 and the cursing of David, said:
“…did not think kings should be seen as immune to the criticism of their subject, at least not the godly ones…allusions are made to Henry VIII’s ideological heritage with a whole series of bad kings from the Old Testament…part of the false church of Antichrist: `with such holy counsellors [sic]…nowadays Ioram, Achab, Ochosias, Ioachim, Zekeikiah and other kings more of Israel and Juda deceived and brought into the great indignation of God’s Writers [sic]l and preachers expected the king and their other readers to back to the Bible and read about the exemplars they mentioned” (244).
The issue is not so easily dismissed. One thinks of the Christian right, middle and left still bringing their moral perspectives to the political arena; the Pope still weighs in on geo-political issues.
ENGLISH BIBLES, 245-246
In an impressive section, Prof. Daniell retells a favorite point: print-runs and the ubiquity of the English Bible. 21 years between Tyndale’s 1526 NT and King Edward VI’s accession in JAN 1547, there were 64 editions (different editions, not fresh printings) of the “whole Bible in English” (245). Yet, in this same period there were no Latin Bibles printed on English presses, although there were 22 across Europe.
This fact is “impressive” given the opposition from Henry VIII and Anglo-Italian clerks (245). The printers had confidence in the “buying public” (245).
A math check. Each print-run = 2000 volumes. That means 120, 000 Bibles printed. One may subtract the 9000 parishes getting an English Bible. That leaves 111, 000 English Bibles for the people.
The nation in this period, on Prof. Daniell’s claim, was about 2.5 million people.
If we assume each family had five people—husband, wife and 3 children—we divide 2.5 million by 5 and get 500, 000 homes. If correct, that’s 1 Bible—roughly—for every 5 familes in the land.
As noted before, ENGLAND WAS AWASH WITH THE ENGLISH BIBLE. That cannot be airbrushed or diminished by historians.
Nailing his point further, Prof. Daniell claims that during Edward VI’s reign, 1547-1553, the whole Bible had 40 print runs at 2,000 per run producing 80, 000 more Bibles. Further, during these 6 years, there were no Latin Bibles produced either.
Or, adding 80,000 and 111, 000, we get 190, 000 English Bibles for 500, 000 homes, about 40% of English homes.
Roman and Anglo-Italian (Tractarian) revisers do not address these issues, given their “driplet-droplet” theologies and earnest wishes to airbrush history. Do Tractarians do exegetical homilies on Romans? Or Pauline theology?
Also, atop all the Bibles, don’t forget the masses singing the metrical Psalters or praying in English Collects and more. Prof. Daniell makes his points.
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION WAS NOT A FAILURE, 246-247
Prof. Daniell draws attention to a quote from the "Calendar of State Papers." The Imperial Ambassador, Van de Delft, during Edward VI’s reign, wrote that he was repeatedly—even unwillingly—impressed by the strong impact of the English Reformation “on the common people” who “turned against tradition religion” because of the “preaching” based on the text and the direct style (247).
An interesting side-note, is undeveloped but is noted by the Professor. Englishmen took Bibles to church to follow the reading and check the sermon references. These days, one never sees an English Bible in the hands of an American Episcopalian although many have a leather-bound 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The RSV is read in driplet-droplet-or-chunkette fashion, but not whole chapters.
In the days of Edward VI, the sermons weren’t 20-minute homilies either.
The massiveness of the revolution of English Bibles and English Books of Common Prayer cannot be missed by neglect, denial or revisionism.
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