FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS

Edited by William Byron Forbush

 

FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS CHAPTER I

FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS CHAPTER II

FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS CHAPTER III

FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS CHAPTER IV

FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS CHAPTER V

 

This is a book that will never die--one of the great English

classics. Interesting as fiction, because it is written with

both passion and tenderness, it tells the dramatic story of some

of the most thrilling periods in Christian history.

Reprinted here in its most complete form, it brings to life

the days when "a noble army, men and boys, the matron and the

maid," "climbed the steep ascent of heaven, 'mid peril, toil, and

pain."

"After the Bible itself, no book so profoundly influenced

early Protestant sentiment as the Book of Martyrs. Even in our

time it is still a living force. It is more than a record of

persecution. It is an arsenal of controversy, a storehouse of

romance, as well as a source of edification."

-- James Miller Dodds, English Prose.

 

FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS

A HISTORY OF THE LIVES, SUFFERINGS AND TRIUMPHANT DEATHS OF THE

EARLY CHRISTIAN AND THE PROTESTANT MARTYRS

 

FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS

"When one recollects that until the appearance of the

Pilgrim's Progress the common people had almost no other reading

matter except the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs, we can

understand the deep impression that this book produced; and how

it served to mold the national character. Those who could read

for themselves learned the full details of all the atrocities

performed on the Protestant reformers; the illiterate could see

the rude illustrations of the various instruments of torture, the

rack, the gridiron, the boiling oil, and then the holy ones

breathing out their souls amid the flames. Take a people just

awakening to a new intellectual and religious life; let several

generations of them, from childhood to old age, pore over such a

book, and its stories become traditions as individual and almost

as potent as songs and customs on a nation's life."

-- Douglas Campbell,

"The Puritan in Holland, England, and America"

"If we divest the book of its accidental character of feud

between churches, it yet stands, in the first years of

Elizabeth's reign, a monument that marks the growing strength of

a desire for spiritual freedom, defiance of those forms that seek

to stifle conscience and fetter thought."

-- Henry Morley, "English Writers"

"After the Bible itself, no book so profoundly inflienced

early Protestant sentiment as the Book of Martyrs. Even in our

own time it is still a living force. It is more than a record of

persecution. It is an arsenal of controversy, a storehouse of

romance, as well as a source of edification."

-- James Miller Dodds, "English Prose"