The great struggle for religious liberty, which began with Huss and Wycliffe, culminated in the age of Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer, and continues to pervade modern thought and feeling, is apt to blind us to earlier movements in the same direction. The sixteenth century is so inseparably linked with our ideas of the Reformation, that to connect the word with a previous epoch seems almost like a paradox. But the intellectual night of the middle ages was not quite as dark as modern Protestant pride is apt to fancy, neither did nations and individuals bow without resistance to the yoke of Rome. The thirteenth century especially may be justly described as an epoch of religious revolution. Heresy raised its multifarious heads in all countries of Europe, from the Danubian principalities to the English shores of the Atlantic. Everywhere the vices of the clergy were laid bare with merciless satire, in many places the cry for liberty of thought and doctrine was raised, and the translation of the Bible into the language of the people is frequently found amongst the demands of heterodox theologians. And whatever the dissensions amongst the various sects might be, they were united in their hatred and opposition to the Church of Rome. This alarming circumstance was fully realised by the man to whose energy the resistance and final victory of Papal supremacy were in a great measure due, Pope Innocent III. Speaking of the various classes of heretics, he says: ‘Species quidem habentes diversas, sed caudas ad invicem colligatas.... Magisterium Ecclesiae Romanae refugiunt.’ As to the extraordinary knowledge of the Bible amongst some of the sects, another unimpeachable witness may be cited,—Reinerius, a Catholic convert and violent assailant of the Waldenses, who professes to have known a common peasant able to recite the whole of the book of Job, and several others who knew the New Testament by heart. It was not without reason, the reader will perceive, that about this time the Church became more and more anxious to wrench such a dangerous source of dissent and argumentation from the hands of the common people. Hence the notion, frequently insisted upon in ecclesiastical writings of the period, of the Bible being a book of unfathomable depth, all but incomprehensible to the greatest scholars, and useless, if not dangerous, to the vulgar.