8. England Prepared for the Reformation.--No revolution has been more gradually prepared than that which separated one half of Europe from the communion of the Roman see; nor were Luther and Zwingle any more than occasional instruments of that change which, had they never existed, would at no great distance of time been effected under the names of some other reformers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the learned, doubtfully and with caution, the ignorant with zeal and eagerness, were tending to depart from the faith and rites which authority prescribed. But probably not even Germany was so far advanced on this course as England. {269} Almost a hundred and fifty years before Luther, nearly the same doctrines as he taught had been maintained by Wycliffe, whose disciples usually called Lollards, lasted as a numerous though obscure and proscribed sect, till aided by the confluence of foreign streams, they swelled into the Protestant church of England. We hear, indeed, little of them during some parts of the fifteenth century, for they generally shunned persecution; and it is chiefly through records of persecution that we learn of the existence of heretics. But immediately before the name of Luther was known, they seem to have become more numerous, or to have attracted more attention; since several persons were burned for heresy, and others abjured their errors in the first years of Henry VIII's reign. Some of these, as usual among ignorant men, engaging in religious speculation, are charged with very absurd notions; but it is not so material to observe their peculiar tenets as the general fact that an inquisitive and sectarian spirit had begun to prevail.--Hallam's Const. Hist. England.