The opening of XIII. THE RISE OF MODERN FREETHOUGHT--(Continued)
§ 4. England
While France was thus passing from general fanaticism to a large measure of freethought, England was passing by a less tempestuous path to a hardly less advanced stage of opinion. It was indeed a bloody age; and in 1535 we have record of nineteen men and five women of Holland, apparently Anabaptists, who denied the "humanity" of Christ and rejected infant baptism and transubstantiation, being sentenced to be burned alive--two suffering at Smithfield, and the rest at other towns, by way of example. Others in Henry's reign suffered the same penalty for the same offence; and in 1538 a priest named Nicholson or Lambert, refusing on the King's personal pressure to recant, was "brent in Smithfield" for denying the bodily presence in the eucharist. [1] The first decades of "Reformation" in England truly saw the opening of new vials of blood. More and Fisher and scores of lesser men died as Catholics for denying the King's "supremacy" in religion; as many more for denying the Catholic tenets which the King held to the last; and not a few by the consent of More and Fisher for translating or circulating the sacred books.