Spaniards and not the English had made that day their triumph. But in the English victory was something more than a victorious battle; it had deeper and far more enduring consequences. It made Protestantism a living, vital force to safeguard the liberties of England against the menace of Romanism; it caused Romanism to be looked upon as a threatening foe always to be guarded against. It is necessary to refer only incidentally to similar causes on the Continent that deepened the conviction of English Protestants. The massacre of the Protestants in France on Saint Bartholomew's Day and the unspeakable cruelties practiced by the Duke of Alva in the Spanish war against the Netherlands, in which he boasted that exclusive of those who fell in battle, siege, and massacre, he had executed eighteen thousand six hundred heretics and traitors,1 aroused the horror and pity of their English coreligionists and strengthened their resolve to yield nothing to Rome and to die in defense of the faith as Frenchmen and Dutchmen had done. Both from France and the Netherlands came refugees seeking an asylum in England, whose recital of the cruelties they had suffered and the persecution they had endured for the sake of conscience made the character of the English Protestant more militant and more than ever determined to revenge himself on his oppressors; more convinced that death were sweeter 1 Campbell: The Puritan in Holland, England, and America, vol. i,

p. 212.

than life in the iron grip of Rome; better an end with terror than terror without end. It is interesting as noting that constant revolution of the wheel of history and social progress to which I have referred in a previous chapter, that these Dutch refugees, driven by persecution from their native land, fled to England, where they settled in the eastern counties, and a few years later, when Englishmen, to escape religious persecution, fled from England to Holland, the migration began in the eastern counties, and it was from these counties there went forth the first settlers of New England.

And now the great power of the printed word was exercising its influence. Few books have so swayed a nation as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which told with all the direct force of Elizabethan English how men had died under the hand of the torturer rather than renounce their faith. By order of Queen Elizabeth a copy was placed in every parish church, and the people read it and were moved by the pity and the horror of that grim tale of religion run mad. It was a time when the Bible was much read; it was a day when there were no newspapers and no circulating libraries, when books were rare and expensive, and when the common people read the Bible because it was the only literature of which they knew. One does not have to be a great scholar to understand the simple and short words in which the Bible is written, or to be thrilled by the melodious beauty of its matchless

diction; and even the poorest intellect can grasp its great lesson of love and sacrifice and duty. If there is one lesson more than another that the Bible teaches, it is the duty of man to resist oppression, to count suffering as naught in defense of the right, to cast down idols and drive forth those who bend the knee to Baal. The Bible left its impress upon the English. It moulded their thought as it influenced their actions, it colored the language and found its expression in the common talk of the people. In piecing together the causes that produced Puritanism, much weight must be given to the deep knowledge the English people had of their Bible and the hold it exercised over them.

"The Bible was as yet," Green says in his peculiarly vivid style, "the one book which was familiar to every Englishman; and everywhere its words, as they fell on ears which custom had not deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a startling enthusiasm. The whole moral effect which is produced nowadays by the religious newspaper, the tract, the essay, the missionary report, the sermon, was then produced by the Bible alone; and its effect in this way, however dispassionately we examine it, was simply amazing. The whole nation became a church." And in another striking passage he says, “the mighty strife of good and evil within the soul itself which had overawed the imagination of dramatist and poet became the one

1 Green: A History of the English People, vol. vi, pp. 190-191.

spiritual conception in the mind of the Puritan. Religion had to do not with churches, but with the individual soul. It was each Christian man who held in his power the issues of life and death. It was in each Christian conscience that the strife was waged between heaven and hell. Not as one of a body, but as a single soul, could each Christian claim his part in the mystery of redemption."

While Calvinism led to democracy, which in its spirit is the merging of the individual in the mass, contradictorily it produced an intense individualism, the like of which the world had never before known. All other religions, the Catholic religion especially, either shifted the burden from the individual to the mass, or else made it possible for the individual to relieve himself of the weight of sin by sharing it with the Church. Calvinism offered no such hope. The Calvinist himself must make his peace with God and his own conscience without an intercessory mediary. He fought always with the powers of darkness in single combat, and it requires more courage to fight alone than with the exhilaration that comes from touching shoulders in the ranks. Calvinism has had much to do in producing the individualistic nature of the American, even among Americans who subscribed not to the doctrines of Calvin. It laid the foundation of American character in the first days of America, and by a natural development the social influence of Calvinism became part of the temper

of the American people when the religious side of Calvinism had expended its force. To Jefferson and Franklin and Charles Carroll one mentions at random merely a few of the signers of the Declaration of Independence - Calvinism meant nothing, but the spirit which it created, the passionate belief in the individuality of man, was the legacy of the Puritanism that had descended to them from the settlers of Massachusetts Bay

"By making man sole sponsor of himself."