[274] Standish, A discourse, &c., ut supra, sig. A. iiij.
[275] English Works, p. 223.
[276] Ibid., p. 223.
[277] Standish, ut supra, sig. E. iiij.
[278] Roger Edgworth, Sermons, f. 31.
[279] The assertion and defence of the Sacrament of the Altar (1546), f. 3. The amateur theologians and teachers who sprung up so plentifully with the growth of Lutheran ideas in England seem to have been a source of trouble to the clergy. There was no difficulty in Scripture so hard which these “barkers, gnawers, and railers,” as Roger Edgworth calls them, were not ready to explain, and even women were ready to become teachers of God’s Word, “and openly to dispute with men.” Speaking in Bristol, in Mary’s reign, he advises his audience to stick to their own occupations and leave theology and Scripture alone, “for when a tailor forsaking his own occupation will be a merchant venturer, or a shoemaker will become a grocer, God send him help. I have known,” he says, “many in this town that studying divinity has killed a merchant, and some of other occupations by their busy labours in the Scripture hath shut up the shop windows, and were fain to take sanctuary, or else for mercery and grocery hath been fain to sell godderds, steaves, pitchers, and such other trumpery.”
[280] A Commentary in Englyshe upon Sayncte Paule’s Epistle to the Ephesians, 1540.
[281] An Exposition in Englysh upon the Epistle of St. Paule to the Colossians, 1548.
[282] An Exposition, &c., upon the Philippians, 1545.
[283] As an example of the open way in which the reading of the Bible was advocated, take the following instance. Caxton’s translation of the Vitæ Patrum, published by Wynkyn de Worde in 1495, contained an exhortation to all his readers to study the Holy Scripture. “To read them is in part to know the felicity eternal, for in them a man may see what he ought to do in conversation … oft to read purgeth the soul from sin, it engendereth dread of God, and it keeps the soul from eternal damnation.” As food nourishes the body, “in like wise as touching the soul we be nourished by the lecture and reading of Scripture.… Be diligent and busy to read the Scriptures, for in reading them the natural wit and understanding are augmented in so much that men find that which ought to be left (undone) and take that whereof may ensue profit infinite” (p. 345).