ss to the year 1525, at which time, or about
which time, a society was enrolled in London calling itself "The
Association of Christian Brothers."[30] It was composed of poor men,
chiefly tradesmen, artisans, a few, a very few of the clergy; but it was
carefully organized, it was provided with moderate funds, which were
regularly audited; and its paid agents went up and down the country
carrying Testaments and tracts with them, and enrolling in the order all
persons who dared to risk their lives in such a cause. The harvest had
been long ripening. The records of the bishops' courts[31] are filled
from the beginning of the century with accounts of prosecutions for
heresy--with prosecutions, that is, of men and women to whom the
masses, the pilgrimages, the indulgences, the pardons, the effete
paraphernalia of the establishment, had become intolerable; who had
risen up in blind resistance, and had declared, with passionate anger,
that whatever was the truth, all this was falsehood. The bishops had not
been idle; they had plied their busy tasks with stake and prison, and
victim after victim had been executed with more than necessary cruelty.
But it was all in vain: punishment only multiplied offenders, and "the
reek" of the martyrs, as was said when Patrick Hamilton was burnt at St.
Andrews, "infected all that it did blow upon."[32]

[Sidenote: Absence of definite guidance.]

[Sidenote: Difficulty from the want of books.]

There were no teachers, however, there were no books, no unity of
conviction, only a confused refusal to believe in lies. Copies of
Wycliffe's Bible remained, which parties here and there, under death
penalties if detected, met to read:[33] copies, also, of some of his
tracts[34] were extant; but they were unprinted transcripts, most rare
and precious, which the watchfulness of the police made it impossible to
multiply through the press, and which remained therefore necessarily in
the possession of but a few fortunate persons.

The Protestants were thus isolated in single groups or families, without
organization, without knowledge of each other, with nothing to give them
coherency as a party; and so they might have long continued, except for
an impulse from some external circumstances. They were waiting for
direction, and men in such a temper are seldom left to wait in vain.

[Sidenote: General condition of the Teutonic nations.]

[Sidenote: The theses on the church-door at Wittenberg,]

[Sidenote: