human
of Christ and rejected infant baptism and transubstantiation, being sentenced to be burned alive--two suffering at Smithfield, and the rest at other towns, by way of example. Others in Henry's reign suffered the same penalty for the same offence; and in 1538 a priest named Nicholson or Lambert, refusing on the King's personal pressure to recant, was
gpt
for denying the bodily presence in the eucharist. [1] The first decades of
human
Reformation in England truly saw the opening of new vials of blood. More and Fisher and scores of lesser men died as Catholics for denying the King's
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in religion; as many more for denying the Catholic tenets which the King held to the last; and not a few by the consent of More and Fisher for translating or circulating the sacred books. Latimer, martyred under Mary, had applauded the burning of the Anabaptists. One generation slew for denial of the humanity of Christ; the next for denial of his divinity. Under Edward VI there were burned no Catholics, but several heretics, including Joan Bocher and a Dutch Unitarian, George Van Pare, described as a man of saintly life. [2] Still the English evolution was less destructive than the French or the German, and the comparative bloodlessness of the strife between Protestant and Catholic under Mary [3] and Elizabeth, the treatment of the Jesuit propaganda under the latter queen as a political rather than a doctrinal question, [4] prevented any such vehemence of recoil from religious ideals as took place in France. When in 1575 the law De hæretico comburendo, which had slept for seventeen years, was set to work anew under Elizabeth, the first victims were Dutch Anabaptists. Of a congregation of them at Aldgate, twenty-seven were imprisoned, of whom ten were burned, and the rest deported. Two others, John Wielmacker and Hendrich Ter Woort, were anti-Trinitarians, and were burned accordingly. Foxe appealed to the Queen to appoint any punishment short of death, or even that of hanging, rather than the horrible death by burning; but in vain.
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All parties at the time concurred
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[6] And when we turn aside from the beaten paths of Elizabethan literature we see clearly what is partly visible from those paths--a number of freethinking variations from the norm of faith. Ascham, as we saw, found some semblance of atheism shockingly common among the travelled upper class of his day; and the testimonies continue. Edward Kirke, writing his
human
to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar in 1578, observes that
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experience having made them skeptical. Erasmus, he notes, in his Adages makes the proverb
human
Nemo senex metuit Jovem signify merely that
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But Kirke insists that,
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Be there not many in Athens which think there is no God, no redemption, no resurrection? Further, he complains that
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; [8] and he proceeds to frame an absurd dialogue of
human
Euphues and Atheos, in which the latter,
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[9] is converted with a burlesque facility. Lilly, who writes as a man-of-the-world believer, is a poor witness as to the atheistic arguments current; but those he cites are so much better than his own, up to the point of terrified collapse on the atheist's part, that he had doubtless heard them. The atheist speaks as a pantheist, identifying deity with the universe; and readily meets a simple appeal to Scripture with the reply that
human
[10] But in one of his own plays, played in 1584, Lilly puts on the stage a glimpse of current controversy in a fashion which suggests that he had not remained so contemptuously confident of the self-evident character of theism. In Campaspe (i, 3) he introduces, undramatically enough, Plato, Aristotle, Cleanthes, Crates, and other philosophers, who converse concerning
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and
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Aristotle is made to confess that he
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; and Plato contends against Cleanthes,
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that
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Cleanthes replies that
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Nothing is concluded, and the debate is adjourned. Anaxarchus declares:
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I will take part with Aristotle, that there is Natura naturans, and yet not God ; while Crates rejoins:
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And I with Plato, that there is Deus optimus maximus, and not Nature.