FOX'S BOOK OF MARTYRS
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. 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"
About the author:
Mr. Fox had joy in the fruits of his work while he was yet alive. It passed through four large editions before his decease, and it was orderred by the bishops to be placed in every cathedral church in England, where it was often found chained, as the Bible was in those days, to a lectern for the access of the people.
At length, having long served both the Church and the world by his ministry, by his pen, and by the unsullied luster of a benevolent, useful, and holy life, he meekly resigned his soul to Christ, on the eighteenth of April, 1587, being then in the seventieth year of his age. He was interred in the chancel of St. Giles', Cripplegate; of which parish he had been, in the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, for some time vicar.
