men who laid down their lives in the
cause of all mankind, it was those grim old Ironsides whose watchwords
were texts from Holy Writ, whose battle-cries were hymns of praise.
[Sidenote: Influence of Puritanism upon modern Europe]

It was to this unwonted alliance of intense religious enthusiasm with
the instinct of self-government and the spirit of personal independence
that the preservation of English freedom was due. When James I. ascended
the English throne, the forces which prepared the Puritan revolt had
been slowly and quietly gathering strength among the people for at least
two centuries. The work which Wyclif had begun in the fourteenth century
had continued to go on in spite of occasional spasmodic attempts to
destroy it with the aid of the statute passed in 1401 for the burning
of heretics. The Lollards can hardly be said at any time to have
constituted a sect, marked off from the established church by the
possession of a system of doctrines held in common. The name by which
they were known was a nickname which might cover almost any amount
of diversity in opinion, like the modern epithets "free-thinker" and
"agnostic." The feature which characterized the Lollards in common was a
bold spirit of inquiry which led them, in spite of persecution, to read
Wyclif's English Bible and call in question such dogmas and rites of the
church as did not seem to find warrant in the sacred text. Clad in long
robes of coarse red wool, barefoot, with pilgrim's staff in hand, the
Lollard preachers fared to and fro among the quaint Gothic towns and
shaded hamlets, setting forth the word of God wherever they could find
listeners, now in the parish church or under the vaulted roof of the
cathedral, now in the churchyard or market-place, or on some green
hillside. During the fifteenth century persecution did much to check
this open preaching, but passages from Wyclif's tracts and texts from
the Bible were copied by hand and passed about among tradesmen and
artisans, yeomen and plough-boys, to be pondered over and talked about
and learned by heart. It was a new revelation to the English people,
this discovery of the Bible. Christ and his disciples seemed to come
very near when the beautiful story of the gospels was first read in
the familiar speech of every-day life. Heretofore they might well have
seemed remote and unreal, just as the school-boy hardly realizes that
the Cato and Cassius over whom he puzzles in his Latin lessons were