Europe, and its general diffusion among the Protestant nations; it gave also a powerful stimulus to public education, and greatly raised the standard of the general intelligence.
Thus the Bible came to a public able to read and value it. In their hands that sacred volume (and in this connection pre-eminently what is said of the Bible must be understood to apply to the New Testament) was a power of moral discipline, cleansing and ordering life, immensely more effective than the elaborate, ubiquitous, always active machinery of ecclesiastical authority.
To let the Bible be crowded out of public knowledge by the inrush of newer claimants is to wound the national morality in a vital place. The New Testament has always been the grand corrective of ecclesiastical aberrations, and the authoritative source of Christian morals; in the Reformation it became the manual of individual practice and the accepted rule of family life, accepted not adequately of course in practice, but universally in principle,
