Search -
The Reformers, Lectures Delivered in St. James' Church, Paisley, by Ministers of the United Presbyterian Church
The Reformers Lectures Delivered in St James' Church Paisley by Ministers of the United Presbyterian Church Author:Reformers General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1885 Original Publisher: J. Maclehose Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can se... more »lect from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: g r a s m n s. Erasmus, though not usually ranked amongst the Reformers, and not regarding himself as one of them, rightly enough finds a place in a course of lectures dealing with those whose life and work influenced the great ecclesiastical and religious movement of the sixteenth century. That event, like some others in history involving interests numerous and varied, and issuing in results momentous and far reaching, was due less to the circumstances of the time in which it took place, and less to the influence of those whose names have become associated with it, than is perhaps generally supposed. In that sphere of human action which forms the province of civil and religious history, as among phenomena of a material kind, causes are oftentimes long at work before they reveal themselves in the effects that follow them. For days before the electric force discharges itself in fire the thunderstorm has been gathering; and it is not until the moon is on the wane that the tidal wave reaches high-water mark along our shores. And that convulsion that ruptured the Eoman Church and sent a wave of blessing over the face of so many nations, was the result of the co-operation of many causes, some of which, at least, had been long at work. One of these causes was undoubtedly the intellectual movement that specially characterized the sixteenth century, and found at the time of the Beformation its brightest ornament in Erasmus. To show how this movement originated, grew, and, as represented by Erasmus, helped to fulfil those conditions without which the cause in which Wyclif lab...« less