Elijah was when it was revealed to him that he was not left alone, for there were 7000 men still living who had not bowed their knees to Baal. "If I had read Wessel before now my enemies might have thought that Luther had taken all his ideas from Wessel, so much are we of one mind."2 At a later date the Reformer gave his judgment on the subject in a quieter tone, but not more correctly, when he remarked that "Wiclif and Huss had attacked the life of the Church under the Papacy, whereas he fought not so much. against the life as the doctrine." Still he sees in these men his fellow-combatants of an earlier time, and men of kindred spirit and principles to his own. When Luther, in 1522, wrote an Anthology from John Wessel, and in 1523 prefixed an appreciative preface to Savonarola's commentaries on the 31st and 37th Psalms; and when again, in 1525, the Trialogus of Wiclif was published in Basel, the meaning of all these incidents was to justify the Reformers of the sixteenth century by the testimony of men of earlier ages who had fought the same battle.

The case is altered, of course, when writers opposed to the Reformation direct their inquiries to the same class of facts, the results at which they arrive being always unfavourable to the Reformers. In comparing the latter with their precursors of earlier times, their uniform aim is to throw them and their doctrines into shadow, either by identifying Luther's principles with those of earlier heretics, so as to place them under a like condemnation, or by attempting to prove that Luther was even worse than his precursors of like spirit. The former was what was aimed at, when the Theological Faculty of Paris, in 1523, decided that the great work against Wiclif, of the English Carmelite, Thomas of Walden († 1431), The Antiquities of the Catholic Faith, was

worthy to be printed and published, "because the same is of great use for the refutation of the destructive Lutheran errors; for herein the Parisian doctors declared the doctrines of the Reformers to be essentially the same as those of Wiclif and the Lollards. John Faber, on the other hand, the South German polemic, who died Bishop of Vienna in 1541, drew a comparison in a controversial work of 1528, between Luther on the one hand, and John Huss and the Bohemian Brethren and John Wessel on the other, in which he reached the conclusion that the latter are all more Christian and less offensive than Luther. He even goes so far at the close of his treatise as to say that if it were possible for all the heretics who lived in the Apostles' days and afterwards, to rise from the dead and to come together face to face with Luther in a general council or otherwise, they would no doubt damn him as a godless arch-heretic, and refuse to have any fellowship with him; so unheard-of, dreadful, and abominable is the false doctrine which Luther has put forward.

These first attempts to bring into view the historical parallels of earlier times, whether proceeding from the Reformers or their adversaries, were all of a partial and incomplete kind, and possessed no value beyond that of occasional pieces. A more comprehensive treatment of the Reformers before the Reformation, their doctrines and their fortunes-a treatment under which the different individualities were exhibited in the light of their unity of principle and spirit-became possible only after the work of the Reformation had, in some measure at least, been brought to a close, and admitted of being taken into one view as a completed work. And this point was not reached till the middle of the sixteenth century.

From that date important works of such a character began to appear on the evangelical side. On the side of Rome only one work has a claim to be mentioned in this connection, viz., the Collection of Documents, Controversial Tracts, and the like, relating to Pre-Reformation Persons and Parties, published by Ortuin Gratius of Cologne in 1535, in prospect of the general council which had then been announced. He was himself one of the Cologne "Obscuri Viri," but was favourable to Church Reform in the Catholic sense; and it was with this view that he selected and published these pieces in the well known "Fasciculus." 5

The corresponding works on the evangelical side divide themselves into two groups, according to the point of view under which they range the particular facts which they embrace. The first group-and this is by far the most numerous-views its subject as a history of persecution, or of evangelical martyrs. The second group handles the personalities whom it introduces as witnesses of the truth, who in earlier times opposed themselves to the Papacy and its "superstition." The first group may be correctly described as more or less belonging to the sphere of the history of the Church, and the second as belonging to the history of doctrine.

The most important, and indeed almost the only representative of the latter group, is Matthias Flacius of Illyricum, properly called Matthias Vlatzich Frankowitsch. This greatest of the historians belonging to the Lutheran Church of the sixteenth century, the founder of The Magdeburg Centuries, published in 1556 his Catalogue of Witnesses to the Truth who opposed themselves to the Pope before our age, as a work preliminary to the Centuries, which appeared in repeated editions, and continued to receive considerable enrichments even in the seventeenth century.

The lead of the first group is taken by an Englishman, the venerable John Foxe. The experiences of his own life and of the church of his native country were what suggested to him the plan of a church history, arranged under the leading idea of persecution directed against the friends of evangelical truth. During the bloody persecutions which took place under Queen Mary, many faithful men fled to the Continent and found an asylum in the Rhine-lands and Switzerland,―e.g., in Frankfort and Strasburg, in Basel, Zurich, Geneva, and elsewhere. Among others John Foxe repaired to Strasburg, and here appeared in 1554 the first edition of the first book of his History of the Church and its Chief Persecutions in all Europe from the times of Wiclif down to the Present Age, a work which he had proceeded with thus far before he left England, and which he dedicated to Duke Christopher of Würtemberg. He commenced the history with Wiclif, partly, no doubt, from patriotic feeling, but partly also because he regarded the measures adopted against Wiclif as the beginning of the storm of persecution which had continued to rage in England, Bohemia, and Scotland down to his own day. Nor must we omit to mention here that at the end of the sixteenth century and in the first half of the seventeenth, Foxe's Book of Martyrs was a favourite family book in many godly English households. Ladies were wont to read it aloud to their children, and to their maidens while at work; and boys as soon as they could read took to the much-loved book. It helped in no small degree to steel the Protestant character of the English people in the seventeenth century.

Foxe's work gave the key-note, and became a model for many similar works in the German, French, and Bohemian tongues; and in most cases these writings, under the title of

Martyrologies, did not confine themselves, any more than Foxe had done, to the domestic persecutions of the countries of their several authors, but included Germany, France, and England, and went back also to the centuries which preceded the Reformation. When a new edition of Foxe was in preparation in 1632, the Bohemian exiles then living in the Netherlands were requested to draw up an account of the persecutions which had fallen upon their native church, with the view of its being incorporated with the English Book of Martyrs. But the new edition was finished at press before the narrative could be got ready, and the Bohemian work remained in manuscript till it appeared in 1648 in Amsterdam or Leyden, under the title, Historia Persecutionum Ecclesiæ Bohemica, which was subsequently translated into German and Bohemian.

During the polemical period which reached from the last quarter of the sixteenth down towards the close of the seventeenth century, all that was done in the field of preReformation history and research was deeply tinged with a controversial character-a remark which applies equally to Germany, France, and England. The first Bodley librarian at Oxford, Thomas James, was an instance in point. This indefatigable scholar, one of the most learned and acute controversialists against Rome, published in 1608 An Apology for John Wyclif. It was written with a polemical view-but at that date it needed a learned and historical interest to be uppermost in the mind even of a polemical writer to induce him to take up the subject of a precursor of the Reformation. Most men were so completely engrossed by the controversies of their own time, that they had neither inclination nor leisure to make excursions into the history of the past.

It was not till the storm-waves of controversial excite