The day when peter in the tanner's house at Joppa was taught through a vision not to despise the Gentiles, may well be described as one of the turning points in the world's history. It was from that time forward that the early Christian church carried the teachings of Jesus the Christ outside the confines of J in lea and Galilee. If it had not been for (his. Paul would never have been permitted by the apostles and brethren at Jerusalem to go on his missionary journeys through Asia Minor and imperial Rome. How Christianity was carried westward is little known to-day but there is little doubt that it was brought to England during the first century. Certainly Eusebius, a great ecclesiastical historian in the early part of the fourth century, records that some of the apostles went to Britain. There is no doubt, however, that Christianity was flourishing in Ireland under Patrick and that Columba carried his missionary work through Scotland from the little barren island of Iona quite apart from the missionary work of Augustine, who was sent to England from Rome by Gregory in the year of our Lord 597.
England has been described as the country of a book, that book being the Bible, and the history of England is the history of the struggle for civic and religious liberty. It was Wycliffe's denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation substantiation which broke the power of the medieval church, as until then its power had rested on the exclusive right of the priests to the performance of the miracle, which it claimed was worked in the mass. It was also Wycliffe's translation of the Bible and the preaching of "the simple priests." or Lollards, that every man had a right to examine the Bible for himself and that the Bible was the foundation of a man's faith, which broke the bonds of religious domination.
Wycliffe has been described as the first Protestant, and it was not long before the struggle for liberty to worship God broke forth in the Reformation, when Luther nailed his theses against the sale of indulgences on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, and thousands of copies of Tyndale's English translation of the Bible were spreading its teachings throughout the length and breadth of England. The teachings of Calvin were also stoutly upheld in Scotland by John Knox and it was the Scots' great love of religious liberty which not even the persecution of the Covenanting days could quell. Was it not this same desire to be allowed to worship God as they thought fit which emboldened the Pilgrim Fathers to set forth for the shores of New England? This was certainly brought out by Pastor John Robinson in the last sermon which he preached to the Pilgrims in the Separatist church in Leyden before they set sail across the Atlantic. "I charge you," he said, '"before God and His blessed angels, that you follow me no farther than you have seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of 13 is, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry: for I am verily persuaded that the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His Holy Word."
