BEING AN AUTHENTIC ACCOUNT OF THE SUFFERINGS
AND DEATHS OF PRIMITIVE AND PROTESTANT MARTYRS
IN VARIOUS COUNTRIES
As Edited by William Byron Forbush
Has Had Material Deleted and other material Added Compared to the Original
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.
“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”
Read this classic work at:
http://particularbaptist.com/library/martyrs_foxe_contents.html
