Ideas so new produced a great clamour. A famous orator undertook one day at Cambridge to show that it was useless to preach conversion to the sinner. "Thou, who, for sixty years past," said he, "hast wallowed in thy lusts, like a sow in her mire,[324] dost thou think that thou canst in one year take as many steps towards heaven, and that in thine age, as thou hast done towards hell?" Bilney left the church with indignation. "Is that preaching repentance in the name of Jesus?" he asked. "Does not this priest tell us: Christ will not save thee.[325] Alas! for so many years that this deadly doctrine has been taught in Christendom, not one man has dared open his mouth against it!" Many of the Cambridge fellows were scandalized at Bilney's language: was not the preacher whose teaching he condemned duly _ordained_ by the bishop? He replied: "What would be the use of being a hundred times consecrated, were it even by a thousand papal bulls, if the inward calling is wanting?[326] To no purpose hath the bishop breathed on our heads if we have never felt the breath of the Holy Ghost in our hearts?" Thus, at the very beginning of the Reformation, England, rejecting the Romish superstitions, discerned with extreme nicety what constitutes the essence of consecration to the service of the Lord. [324] Even as a beast in his own dung. Bilnæus Tonstallo episcopo; Foxe, Acts, iv, p. 640. [325] He will not be thy Jesus or Saviour. Ibid. [326] Without this inward calling it helpeth nothing before God to be a hundred times elect and consecrated. Ibid. p. 638. After pronouncing these noble words, Bilney, who longed for an outpouring of the Holy Ghost, shut himself up in his room, fell on his knees, and called upon God to come to the assistance of his church. Then rising up, he exclaimed, as if animated by a prophetic spirit: "A new time is beginning. The Christian assembly is about to be renewed.... Some one is coming unto us, I see him, I hear him--it is Jesus Christ.[327]... He is the king, and it is he who will call the true ministers commissioned to evangelize his people." [327] If it be Christ, him that cometh unto us. Ibid. p. 637. Tyndale, full of the same hopes as Bilney, left Cambridge in the course of the year 1519. Thus the English Reformation began independently of those of Luther and Zwingle--deriving its origin from God alone. In every province of Christendom there was a simultaneous action of the divine word. The principle of the Reformation at Oxford, Cambridge, and London was the _Greek New Testament_, published by Erasmus. England, in course of time learnt to be proud of this origin of its Reformation. CHAPTER III.