The Trials of the Church, Vol. 2

Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Trials of the Church, Vol. 2: Or the Persecutors of Religion In this volume it is intended to place before the reader an account of the sufferings of the faithful from the middle of the sixteenth century down to the present. This will embrace the persecutions in Great Britain and Ireland, Abyssinia and the Corea, together with the actual conflict now being waged in Italy and Germany. In 1534, Henry VIII. revolted against the authority of the vicar of Christ, and became, by law, the supreme head of the Catholic Church in England. From that moment a persecution was begun which for severity and duration finds hardly a parallel in the history of the Christian world. Even yet its baneful effects are severely felt, while of the proscriptive enactments framed in those days some are still in existence. The refusal of the sovereign pontiff to grant his majesty a divorce from his lawful wife, is generally regarded as the origin of Henry's schism and of the subsequent apostasy of the nation. In one sense, this is true. 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.