By the side of Henry VIII. stands the sublime figure of Hugh Latimer,
most dauntless of preachers, the one man before whose stern rebuke the
headstrong and masterful Tudor monarch quailed. It was Latimer
that renewed the work of Wyclif. and in his life as well as in his
martyrdom,--to use his own words of good cheer uttered while the fagots
were kindling around him,--lighted "such a candle in England as by God's
grace shall never be put out." This indomitable man belonged to that
middle-class of self-governing, self-respecting yeomanry that has been
the glory of free England and free America. He was one of the sturdy
race that overthrew French chivalry at Crecy and twice drove the
soldiery of a tyrant down the slope of Bunker Hill. In boyhood he worked
on his father's farm and helped his mother to milk the thirty kine; he
practised archery on the village green, studied in the village school,
went to Cambridge, and became the foremost preacher of Christendom. Now
the most thorough and radical work of the English Reformation was done
by this class of men of which Latimer was the type. It was work that was
national in its scope, arousing to fervent heat the strong religious
and moral sentiment of the people, and hence it soon quite outran the
cautious and conservative policy of the government, and tended to
introduce changes extremely distasteful to those who wished to keep
England as nearly Catholic as was consistent with independence of the
pope. Hence before the end of Elizabeth's reign, we find the crown set
almost as strongly against Puritanism as against Romanism. Hence, too,
when under Elizabeth's successors the great decisive struggle between
despotism and liberty was inaugurated, we find all the tremendous force
of this newly awakened religious enthusiasm cooperating with the English
love of self-government and carrying it under Cromwell to victory. From
this fortunate alliance of religious and political forces has come all
the noble and fruitful work of the last two centuries in which men of