“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, 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 influenced 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.