Thus they turned from the Church and clergy to the Bible
itself. English Puritanism was nourished in the womb by a study
of the Bible, both in the Vulgate and in vernacular translations.
In medieval times there was a general belief in the literal in-
spiration both of the Old and of the New Testaments, and access
to the Bible by laymen inevitably meant that the Word of God
as contained in the Bible was quoted as an authority overriding
the pronouncements of priests, bishops, and popes. It is not
surprising that the Church was perennially concerned to deny
direct access by laymen to Holy Scripture. In the minds of those
heretics who insisted on such direct access, the Bible not only
came to supersede the Church as a source of authority, but, in
the long run more importantly, study of the Bible came to
supersede the Sacraments of the Church as a means of Grace.

Up to the time of the political Reformation, access to the
vernacular Bible was limited to comparatively few people.
The more generalized access which became possible after the
political Reformation caused an impact on minds of the
English people which it is almost impossible to over-estimate.
It was an age of ample leisure and few books. It was an age quite
untouched either by the scepticism of the scientist or by the
rationalizations of the philosother. The Church was becoming
discredited, in so far as it was becoming discredited, not because
its miraculous pretensions strained men's credulity, but because
its mundane inefficiency failed to satisfy men's imagination.
'The hungry sheep looked up and were not fed.'

The vernacular Bible provided the spiritual food which was
lacking to feed the imaginations, the faith and the loyalty of
thousands of English people. In many--perhaps in most--minds
the attraction or this new revelation of God (for that is what
the vernacular Bible must have seemed) was counterbalanced
by the pull still exercised by the traditional ways. This attraction
and counter-attraction was the basis of the Anglican Establish-
ment which in essence was a compromise between the Catholic
and the Protestant, between the Sacramental and the Evangelical,
view of Christianity. It was a compromise, not in the sense of its
being a mere political convenience, nor in the sense of its being

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