Excerpt from A Discourse: Delivered at Plymouth, Dec; 20, 1828, on the Two Hundred and Eighth Anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers The character of our ancestors, with some notice of the departure from their faith and piety Visible among their descendants, will occupy the present hour. Three centuries of the Christian era had scarcely passed away, before the church of Christ, which had been planted wholly a right vine, began to lose its spirituality, to substitute the form of godliness for the power, and to be captivated more by worldly pomp, than by the glories of a holy heaven. The god of this world multiplied his unmeaning ceremonies, and threw them in as a veil be twixt unthinking mortals and the fountain of light. He shut up the Bible.* Every engine of power, rank, titles, Tyndall, styled by Fox England's Apostle, was cruelly strangled and burnt in 1536, by the English Catholics, for no other crime than his having translated and published the Bible in the English language. His was the first printed copy of the Holy Scriptures entire in the English tongue. Most of his first edition of the New Testament was bought up at great expense and burnt by the Bishop of London at Paul's Cross - Middleton's Life of Tyndall. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.