SIX LECTURES ON GREAT MEN DELIVERED AT THE MONTHLY PAROCHIAL MEETING IN S. JOHN'S SCHOOL ROOM KESWICK 1842......1848 FOR PRIVATE DISTRIBUTION ONLY. THOMAS CRANMER MY DEAR PARISHIONERS AND FRIENDS : I am going to speak to you this evening of THOMAS CRANMER. His story, however, is familiar to you: probably so familiar that at first you may feel some surprise that I should include in my catalogue of Great Men one who was so confessedly deficient in several of the qualities which I have frequently represented to you as characteristic of those whom I think the most worthy of our admiration and our study. I acknowledge at once, then, that I do not bring him before you wholly for his own sake (though from peculiar sympathy with some parts of his character and opinions I think more favourably of him than most men do) but also very much for the sake of having an opportunity for laying before you some account of his times—a period of English history of exceeding interest to us-the great era of our Reformation. And truly the more I consider the events of modern European History, the more important seems to me this period of its Religious Reformation -a period the importance of which, I believe, it is more difficult to comprehend than to exaggerate and which will grow to be recognised as of greater and greater significance as the history of the Church and of the world goes on. It was verily the grandest epoch in the history of Human Progress since the Christian Era began a new birth of Christendoma step onwards for our Race well planted and irrevocable. For it was not merely a Reformation of Discipline b |