which she had beguiled her followers and
committed abominations with the people, fall harmless from their necks.

The translation of the Bible was the chief engine in the great work. It
threw open, by a secret spring, the rich treasures of religion and
morality, which had been there locked up as in a shrine. It revealed the
visions of the prophets, and conveyed the lessons of inspired teachers
(such they were thought) to the meanest of the people. It gave them a
common interest in the common cause. Their hearts burnt within them as
they read. It gave a mind to the people, by giving them common subjects of
thought and feeling. It cemented their union of character and sentiment:
it created endless diversity and collision of opinion. They found objects
to employ their faculties, and a motive in the magnitude of the
consequences attached to them, to exert the utmost eagerness in the
pursuit of truth, and the most daring intrepidity in maintaining it.
Religious controversy sharpens the understanding by the subtlety and
remoteness of the topics it discusses, and braces the will by their
infinite importance. We perceive in the history of this period a nervous
masculine intellect. No levity, no feebleness, no indifference; or if
there were, it is a relaxation from the intense activity which gives a
tone to its general character. But there is a gravity approaching to
piety; a seriousness of impression, a conscientious severity of argument,
an habitual fervour and enthusiasm in their mode of handling almost every
subject. The debates of the schoolmen were sharp and subtle enough; but
they wanted interest and grandeur, and were besides confined to a few:
they did not affect the general mass of the community. But the Bible was
thrown open to all ranks and conditions "to run and read," with its
wonderful table of contents from Genesis to the Revelations. Every village
in England would present the scene so well described in Burns's Cotter's
Saturday Night. I cannot think that all this variety and weight of
knowledge could be thrown in all at once upon the mind of a people, and
not make some impression upon it, the traces of which might be discerned
in the manners and literature of the age. For to leave more disputable
points, and take only the historical parts of the Old Testament, or the
moral sentiments of the New, there is nothing like them in the power of
exciting awe and admiration, or of rivetting sympathy. We see what Milton
h