Councils of Constance and Basle, perished at the stake in 1432. Jerome Savonarola, tortured and burnt in 1498, and other minor names, urged forward the fatal movement until the Northern element once more prevailed, in things spiritual as in things temporal, over the Southern; the rude and violent German again attacked the soft, sensuous Italian, and Martin Luther hatched the egg which the schools of Rabelais and Erasmus had laid. It was the work of rough-handed men; the reformer Zuingle emerged from an Alpine shepherd's hut; Melancthon, the theologian, from an armorer's shop, as Augustine, the monk, from the cottage of a poor miner. Such, in the 16th century, on the Continent of Europe, were the prototypes and predecessors of Messrs. Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon, and Brigham Young, who arose nearly three centuries afterward in the New World.
In England, when the unprincipled tyranny of Henry VIII. had established, by robbing and confiscating, hanging and quartering, that "reformed new-cast religion," of which Sir Thomas Brown "disliked nothing but the name," the bigotry of the ultra-reformatory school lost no time in proceeding to extremes. William Chillingworth, born A.D. 1602, and alternately Protestant, Catholic, Socinian, and Protestant, put forth in his "Religion of Protestants a safe Way of Salvation," that Chillingworthi Novissima, "the Bible and nothing but the Bible." This dogma swept away ruthlessly all the cherished traditions of a past age—the ancient observed customs of the Church—all, in fact, that can beautify and render venerable a faith, and substituted in their stead a bald Bibliolatry which at once justifies credulity and forbids it; which tantalizes man with the signs and wonders of antiquity, and yet which, with an unwise contradictoriness, forbids him to revise or restore them. And as each man became, by Bible-reading, his own interpreter, with fullest right of private judgment, and without any infallible guide—the inherent weakness of reformation—to direct him, the broad and beaten highway of belief was at once cut up into a parcel of little footpaths which presently attained the extreme of divergence.
One of the earliest products of such "religious freedom" in England was Methodism, so called from the Methodistic physicians at Rome. The founder and arch-priest of the schism, the Rev. John Wesley, son of the Rector of Epworth in Lincolnshire, and born in 1703, followed Luther, Calvin, and other creedmongers in acting upon his own speculation and peculiar opinions. One of his earliest disciples—only eleven years younger than his master—was the equally celebrated George Whitfield, of Gloucester. Suffice it to remark, without dwelling upon their history, that both these religionists, and mostly the latter, who died in 1770 at Newberry, New England, converted and preached to thousands in America, there establishing field-services and camp-meetings, revivals and conferences, which, like those of the French Convulsionists in the
