s. Copies of
Wycliffe's Bible remained, which parties here and there, under death
penalties if detected, met to read;[481] copies, also, of some of his
tracts[482] 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
organisation, 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.

The state of England did but represent the state of all Northern Europe.
Wherever the Teutonic language was spoken, wherever the Teutonic nature was
in the people, there was the same weariness of unreality, the same craving
for a higher life. England rather lagged behind than was a leader in the
race of discontent. In Germany, all classes shared the common feeling; in
England it was almost confined to the lowest. But, wherever it existed, it
was a free, spontaneous growth in each separate breast, not propagated by
agitation, but springing self sown, the expression of the honest anger of
honest men at a system which had passed the limits of toleration, and which
could be endured no longer. At such times the minds of men are like a train
of gunpowder, the isolated grains of which have no relation to each other,
and no effect on each other, while they remain unignited; but let a spark
kindle but one of them, and they shoot into instant union in a common
explosion. Such a spark was kindled in Germany, at Wittenberg, on the 31st
of October, 1517. In the middle of that day Luther's denunciation of
Indulgences was fixed against the gate of All Saints church, Wittenberg,
and it became, like the brazen serpent in the wilderness, the sign to which
the sick spirits throughout the western world looked hopefully and were
healed. In all those millions of hearts the words of Luther found an echo,
and flew from lip to lip, from ear to ear. The thing which all were longing
for was done, and in two years from that day there was scarcely perhaps a
village from the Irish Channel to the Danube in which the name of Luther
was not familiar as a word of hope and promise. Then rose a comm