No one can read the history of Christendom as it was six hundred years ago and not see that darkness covered the whole professing church, even a darkness that could be felt (Exodus 10:21). So great was the change that had come over Christianity that if an apostle had risen from the dead, he would not have recognized it, but would have thought that heathenism had revived again!
The doctrines of the gospel lay buried under a dense mass of human traditions. Penances, pilgrimages, indulgences, relic worship, image worship, saint worship, and worship of the Virgin Mary formed the sum and substance of most people’s religion. The Roman Catholic Church was made an idol. The priests usurped the place of Christ. By what means was all this miserable darkness cleared away? By none so much as by once more bringing forth the Bible.
It was not merely the preaching of Martin Luther and his friends that established Protestantism in Germany. The grand lever that overthrew the pope’s power in that country was Luther’s translation of the Bible into the German language. It was not merely the writings of Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformers that cast down Roman Catholicism in England.
The seeds of the work thus carried forward were first sown by John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible many years before. It was not merely the quarrel of Henry VIII and the pope of Rome that loosened the pope’s hold on English minds. It was the royal permission to have the Bible translated and set up in churches so that everyone who wanted to read it could do so.
J.C. Ryle, Practical Religion: What True, Biblical Christianity Should Look Like
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