ABSTRACT
The England of the Reformation, to which posterity turns as a source of high debates on church government and doctrine, was to contemporaries a cauldron seething with economic unrest and social passions. The land question had been a serious matter for the greater part of a century before the Reformation. In England, as in Germany and Switzerland, men had dreamed of a Reformation which would reform the State and society, as well as the Church. Membership of the Church and of the State being co-extensive and equally compulsory, the Government used the ecclesiastical organization of the parish for purposes which, in a later age, when the religious, political and economic aspects of life were disentangled, were to be regarded as secular. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors.
