the Bible had come to mean all that it meant to the men who wrote it. To
the Englishmen who listened to Latimer, to the Scotchmen who listened
to Knox, the Bible more than filled the place which in modern times
is filled by poem and essay, by novel and newspaper and scientific
treatise. To its pages they went for daily instruction and comfort,
with its strange Semitic names they baptized their children, upon its
precepts, too often misunderstood and misapplied, they sought to build
up a rule of life that might raise them above the crude and unsatisfying
world into which they were born. [Sidenote: The English version of the
Bible]

It would be wrong to accredit all this awakening of spiritual life in
England to Wyclif and the Lollards, for it was only after the Bible, in
the translations of Tyndall and Coverdale, had been made free to the
whole English people in the reign of Edward VI. that its significance
began to be apparent; and it was only a century later, in the time of
Cromwell and Milton, that its full fruition was reached. It was with the
Lollards, however, that the spiritual awakening began and was continued
until its effects, when they came, were marked by surprising maturity
and suddenness. Because the Lollards were not a clearly defined sect, it
was hard to trace the manifold ramifications of their work. During the
terrible Wars of the Roses, contemporary chroniclers had little or
nothing to say about the labours of these humble men, which seemed
of less importance than now, when we read them in the light of their
world-wide results. From this silence some modern historians have
carelessly inferred that the nascent Protestantism of the Lollards had
been extinguished by persecution under the Lancastrian kings, and was in
nowise continuous with modern English Protestantism. Nothing could be
more erroneous. The extent to which the Lollard leaven had permeated all
classes of English society was first clearly revealed when Henry VIII.