Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
The theologians of the Catholic church and of the Reformed churches on one side the Cardinal of Lorraine, Cardinals Campeggi and Sadolet, and other learned priests or prelates, and on the other side Calvin, Theodore de Beze, Melancthon, and Bucer were working with zeal to build up into systems of dogma their interpretations of the great facts of Christianity, and they succeeded in implanting a passionate attachment to them in their flocks.
He must needs disseminate his opinions in a book entitled De Trinitatis Erroribus, which has handed the name of Servetus down to posterity as the author of errors opposed to the tenets of the Christian Faith. Bucer declared that he deserved the most shameful death on account of the ideas set forth in this work.
Bucer and Fagius were sent to lecture at Cambridge, Peter Martyr advocated the anti-sacramentarian views of Calvin at Oxford. Cranmer welcomed refugees from every country, Germans, Italians, French, Poles, and Swiss, to his palace at Lambeth.
He terms it 'a wicked book, and why but 'for allowing other causes of Divorce than Christ and his Apostles mention; and with the same censure condemns of wickedness not only Martin Bucer, that elect instrument of Reformation, highly honoured and had in reverence by Edward the Sixth and his whole Parliament whom also I had published in English, by a good providence, about a week before this calumnious digression was preached, so that, if he knew not Bucer then, as he ought to have known, he might at least have known him some months after, ere the Sermon came in print; wherein, notwithstanding, he persists in his former sentence, and condemns again of wickedness, either ignorantly or wilfully, not only Martin Bucer, and all the choicest and holiest of our Reformers, but the whole Parliament and Church of England in those best and purest times of Edward the Sixth.
"When the book," he says, "had been now the second time set forth well-nigh three months, as I best remember, I then first came to hear that Martin Bucer had written much concerning Divorce: whom earnestly turning over, I soon perceived, but not without amazement, in the same opinion, confirmed with the same reasons, which in that published book, without the help or imitation of any precedent writer, I had laboured out and laid together."
"We have never," he added, in a letter to the Brethren, "attained to such a discipline and holy life as is found among you, but in the future we shall make it our aim to attain it." The other great Reformers were just as enthusiastic. "How shall I," said Bucer, "instruct those whom God Himself has instructed! You alone, in all the world, combine a wholesome discipline with a pure faith."
It is a question whether the attention bestowed on the Royal library during the reign of Edward VI. was an advantage to it or the reverse. It is true that the energy of Sir John Cheke, and Roger Ascham, King's librarian, secured for it the manuscripts that had belonged to Martin Bucer; but on the other hand, the rabid intolerance of Edward's Council deprived it of many of its valuable contents.
It was recognised and praised by Luther, Calvin, Melancthon, Bucer, Bullinger and other saints. As long as the moral life of the Church of Rome remained at such a low ebb, so long would there be need for the Brethren's Church. "If the Church of Rome will mend her ways, the Brethren," said he, "will return to her fold; but till that blessed change takes place they will remain where they are."
This fact in English history, it is evident, together with the knowledge of such an amount of scattered opinion in his favour lying in the works of other authors besides his formerly quoted Bucer, Fagius, Erasmus and Grotius, had been acquired by Milton by fresh research since he had published his Bucer Tract.
"I may justly gratulate mine own mind with due acknowledgment of assistance from above, which led me, not as a learner, but as a collateral teacher, to a sympathy of judgment with no less a man than Martin Bucer.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking