8. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poets.
9. Henry Morley's English Literature in the Reign of Victoria. (Tauchnitz Series.)
{299}
CHAPTER IX.
THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN GREAT BRITAIN.
BY JOHN FLETCHER HURST.
Miracle plays, rude dramatic representations of the chief events in Scripture history, were used for popular instruction before the invention of printing. In England they began as early as the twelfth century. Moral plays, or moralities, were of the same origin, though dating from the fifteenth century. These were somewhat more refined than the miracle plays, and usually set forth the excellence of the virtues, such as truth, mercy, and the like. Both miracle and moral plays were under the conduct of the clergy.
John Bale (1495-1563) was Bishop of Ossory, and wrote much for popular reform. He was the author of nineteen miracle plays. Lord Edward Herbert, of Cherbury (1581-1648), wrote a deistical work, De Religione Gentilium, the first of that school of writers which later appeared in Bolingbroke. John Spotiswood (1565-1639), Archbishop of St. Andrews and afterward Chancellor of Scotland, wrote a voluminous History of the Church of Scotland. George Sandys (1577-1643), {300} distinguished also as one of the earliest literary characters in America, wrote metrical versions of several of the poetical books of the Bible, and also a tragedy called Christ's Passion.
John Knox (1505-1572), the great Scotch reformer and polemic, while more prominent as the preacher and spokesman of the Scotch Reformation, wrote First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regimen of Women (1558), and the Historie of the Reformation of Religion within the Realme of Scotland, published after his death. John Jewel (1522-1571) wrote in Latin his Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae. William Whittingham (1524-1589), who succeeded Knox as pastor of the English Church at Geneva, aided in making the Genevan Version of the Bible and also co-operated in the Sternhold and Hopkins translation of the Psalms.
John Fox (1517-1587) was the author of the Book of Martyrs, whose full title was Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days, Touching Matters of the Church. An abridgment of the work has had a very wide circulation. John Aylmer (1521-1594) replied to Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet in a work called An Harbor for Faithful and True Subjects. Nicholas Sanders (1527-1580), a Roman Catholic professor of Oxford, wrote The Rock of the Church, a defense of the primacy of Peter and the Bishops of Rome. Robert Parsons (1546-1610), a Jesuit, wrote several works in advocacy of Roman Catholicism and some political tracts.