Socialism and the Pope

the Bible a book of freedom, and the idea of freedom could not be tolerated b the ruling oppression. Its circulation, in any form, destroyed superstition, and finally turned the great theologians and divines, jurists, Statesmen, and men of letters, into believers in the humanity as distinct from the divinity of Jesus.

According to Strype, within ten years of the official circulation of the Bible, and either years after Coverdale's own translation of the Bible was introduced for Public Reading into the churches throughout England by Act of Parliament the following "heresies" were widespread:-

(1) Denial of the Doctrine of the Trinity;
(2) Assert that Jesus Christ was mere man and not God;
(3) Assertion of the doctrine that the only benefit which men receive from Jesus consists in his teaching, which brings them to a knowledge of God and of service to man.

This was in the year 1547, when Miles Coverdale returned to England from his long sojourn on the Continent.

Coverdale was born in Yorkshire in 1488, and was educated in the convent of the Augustines, in Cambridge. He became a monk of this Order. In 1514, he was ordained a priest at Norwich, but continued to reside at Cambridge. When Dr. Barnes was apprehended, Coverdale assumed the habit of a secular priest, and travelled throughout the country, preaching until he deemed it prudent to take refuge abroad.

The year after Coverdale's return, on December 28, 1548, to be exact, John Assheton, Vicar of Middleton, Lancashire, was summoned to appear before Archbishop Cranmer, at Lambeth, for denying the Trinity, asserting the mere manhood of Jesus, and also denying the deity of the Holy Spirit. Assheton abjured his heresies under threat of the stake; but their character point to the nature of the opinions that thoughtful minds tended to embrace. Once men and women thought, the impossible Pagan-Christian theology declined at a rapid rate.

Assheton only recanted under threat of torture. But Coverdale preached, the very same year, for purposes of advancement, to his very shame, at St. Paul's Cross, when an Anabaptist, inspired by the very Bible Coverdale had translated, was forced to do penance.

"Life, not Dogma, makes the Christian," was the sound slogan of the Anabaptists. This may have lead to mysticism, but it developed also, Communism. At the beginning Anabaptism was indistinguishable from Unitarianism. But Unitarianism tended to rationalism and individualism. Unitarianism was an ideal expression of Protestantism in all the logical glory of its capitalist development. It embodied the essential truth against which Coverdale should never have warred. Coverdale should have sympathized with the Anabaptist slogan.

In 1550, Joan Bocher, for denying the incarnation and maintaining that Jesus was not God but a creature, was persecuted to death