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Updated: June 22, 2025
His zeal and purity of life had caused him to be trusted by the University as a maintainer of old ways; he had been appointed cross- bearer to the University, and elected one of the twelve preachers annually appointed in obedience to a bull of Pope Alexander VI. Now Latimer walked and worked with Bilney, visiting the sick and the prisoners, and reasoning together of the needs of Christendom.
They found their way at once to the Universities, where the intellectual impulse given by the New Learning was quickening religious speculation. Cambridge had already won a name for heresy; Barnes, one of its foremost scholars, had to carry his fagot before Wolsey at St. Paul's; two other Cambridge teachers, Bilney and Latimer, were already known as "Lutherans."
We see it is so in some measure at this day; what light, and with what clearness do the saints in this day see the things pertaining to the kingdom of God, beyond what the holy and goodly martyrs and saints did in the days that were before us; Huss, Bilney, Ridley, Hooper, Cranmer, with their brethren, if they were now in the world, would cry out and say, Our light and knowledge of the word of the Testament of Christ was much inferior to the light that at this day is broken forth, and that will yet daily, in despite of men and devils, display its rays and beams amongst the sons of men!
While men like Bilney and Bainham were teaching with words and writings, there were stout English hearts labouring also on the practical side of the same conflict, instilling the same lessons, and meeting for themselves the same consequences. Speculative superstition was to be met with speculative denial. Practical idolatry required a rougher method of disenchantment.
At the time when Henry VIII. was writing against Luther, Latimer was fleshing his maiden sword in an attack upon Melancthon; and he remained, he said, till he was thirty, "in darkness and the shadow of death." About this time he became acquainted with Bilney, whom he calls "the instrument whereby God called him to knowledge."
Thomas Bilney, one of our Protestant martyrs, was a Norfolk man. It was a Norfolk knight, Sir Thomas Erpingham, who gave signal for the archers at Agincourt. Shakespeare refers to him in his ‘King Henry V.’ as follows: ‘KING.—Good-morrow, old Sir Thomas Erpingham; A good soft pillow for that good white head Were better than a churlish turf of France.
I said that Bilney, one of the first martyrs of the Reformation, when he was converted, went immediately to make confession to Latimer, and by doing so he became the means of his conversion. "Go, by all means; you do not know what use the Lord may make of your testimony."
At the time when Henry VIII. was writing against Luther, Latimer was fleshing his maiden sword in an attack upon Melancthon; and he remained, he said, till he was thirty, "in darkness and the shadow of death." About this time he became acquainted with Bilney, whom he calls "the instrument whereby God called him to knowledge."
Bilney, after escaping through Wolsey's hands in 1527, was again cited in 1529 before the Bishop of London. Three times he refused to recant. He was offered a fourth and last chance. The temptation was too strong, and he fell. For two years he was hopelessly miserable; at length his braver nature prevailed.
In Bilney, doubtless, he found a sound instructor; but a careful reader of his sermons will see traces of a teaching for which he was indebted to no human master. His deepest knowledge was that which stole upon him unconsciously through the experience of life and the world.
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