William Tyndale was a real reformer. His dates, 1494-1536, were close to Luther`s 1483-1546. He intended to reveal the meaning of Scripture to all good Christians. He noticed that the Scriptures contained no mention of purgatory or the sacraments. He upheld sola fidei (faith alone) and sola scriptura (scripture alone) and the redemption of the elect through the blood of Christ. Tyndale`s translation of the New Testament was much used in the King James version.
Ackroyd gives an impressive summing up of the Reformation in England. By the sixteenth century the majority may in part have been reformed in external matters, but they were not excessively so. They were not concerned with the absolute primacy of scriptures. That was left to the evangelicals. They may have paid lip service to the justification by faith alone, but they were more interested in good works. Ambiguity and compromise were part of the English temper; doctrinal purity was not.
Ackroyd writes that the nation crept towards Protestantism guided by the theologian Richard Hooker at a slow and uncertain pace. Hooker held the view that there was room in the faith for more than was contained in the Bible, namely reason, and elucidation and interpretation of the Bible itself. Ackroyd adds that Hooker did not dislodge ‘the central truth’ that the Church of England was firmly established upon Calvinist theology. Ackroyd continues that neglect and forgetfulness, aided by apathy and indifference, slowly weakened the Catholic religion beyond repair. Influences remained. William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Charles the First, delighted in formal ritual, public ceremony, candles and incense, stained glass and embroidered vestments. He also valued the beauty of holiness. He was executed by the Puritan government.
Oliver Cromwell, who was what we would now call a Congregationalist, won the civil war. He had no patience for religious debate and doctrinal niceties. He waited for what he called ‘Providence.’ He prayed for a sign to show him the way in any great endeavour. He wrote that ‘we follow the Lord that goeth before’ and sought for the divine meaning in the events that occurred around him. To its very considerable credit, the Puritan Government later resigned from office, a measure rare among revolutionaries.
The English Civil War exhibited a tendency in Protestantism towards fragmentation in its production of Quakers, Ranters, and Diggers. It also brought influential mystics to the surface, for example, George Fox and Gerrard Winstanley. The former was the founder of Quakers and the latter led a Christian communist group known as the Diggers. Both had a strong belief in the Divine Light within. Something similar was experienced later by John Wesley, founder of Methodism and William Booth, a founder of the Salvation Army.
Wesley`s own experience included an ‘assurance’ that his sins had been forgiven. The significance of this in Protestantism can scarcely be over-estimated. Salvation depended on having faith. But what if you didn’t receive it? You would remain a sinner with the prospect of damnation. Wesley offered an assurance of forgiveness: – all believing Christians were entitled to it. Wesley took his teaching out of doors: – hillsides, churchyards, open markets. He covered as much as 20,000 miles a year on horseback. It is estimated that he rode 225,000 miles and preached 40,000 sermons. Not everyone loved him. He was often beaten, abused and pelted with stones and bricks.
Wesley belongs to the 18th century. John Henry Newman’s life spanned almost the entire 19th century. There is a chapter in the book about him. At an early age he possessed a sense of mystery which never left him. ‘I thought life might be a dream,’ he wrote in later life, ‘and all this world a deception.’ In his early teenage he was an atheist, but a classics master swept him into Calvinism, and Newman felt he was born again by faith in Christ, and so guided towards ultimate salvation. Newman became a clergyman at the higher end of Anglicanism, but his investigation of the heresies of the early church led him to believe that their abandonment was brought about only by Rome, and that the Protestant reformers were essentially the same as the ancient heretics. He became a Catholic at a time when Catholicism in England was comprised mainly of the Irish working class who had migrated to Liverpool, and the local gentry of the North, who had withstood the advances of the Reformation. The two did not mix easily. Newman must have had some difficulty in adjusting to the Catholic ethos, but the conclusion of his Apologia shows that in the Birmingham Oratory he found the companions he needed. The mention of them on the last page of the Apologia is one of the most moving of testimonies. The farewell he wrote for his tombstone expressed his long held conviction that he was going “out of shadows and images into the truth.’
William Booth (1829 to 1912) with his wife, were founders of the Salvation Army. He had a sudden conversion and sanctification similar to that of George Fox’s Inner Light and Wesley’s perfectionism,  and had a powerful social conscience. He wrote his first social manifesto ‘In Darkest England And The Way Out’ in which he described ‘the shambles of our civilization, with its lost, its outcasts, and its disinherited.’ The Salvationists established food depots, shelters, rescue homes, and more. By the end of the 19th century, there were 100,000 soldiers, male and female, in the service of the Army. In 1894, Keir Hardie, founder of the Scottish Labour Party and its first parliamentary leader, wrote ‘I claim for Socialism that it is the embodiment of Christianity in our industrial system.’ Thus were the British Masses protected from Marxism.
There are chapters on GK Chesterton and CS Lewis which show their constructive optimism in challenging times. There is a sympathetic chapter on Pentecostalism. One is surprised to read that speaking in tongues, often held to be unique to Pentecostals, is done by non-Christian groups in Africa and Indonesia, and even by Satanist groups.
This is a great story, well told.
*There is a good article about universals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_universals