35 RIGHT REV. BISHOP E. GRAHAM IXGHAM, D.D., ON 



brought in the greatest event in all our history — the English 

 Reformation. I do -not stay to speak of men, whether Kings, 

 Prelates or Commoners. God can use, has used, all sorts of men 

 for the working out of His purposes. It is enough to point out 

 that when the Word of God was no longer rare, open vision 

 began — vision of God, vision of what the Church was intended 

 to be (and was not) ; vision, too, through an opening door, of a 

 bigger world than the Englishman had ever known before. For 

 these scholars, now emerging from Hampton Court, had produced 

 from several versions what our Coronation Service now describes 

 as " the most valuable thing this world affords " ! 



Let us now look a little in front of 1611. It is one of the 

 romances of history that the open door waited upon and speedily 

 followed the open book. No man thought of building up Empire 

 when the voyage of " The Maj^ower " was planned for 1620. 



And yet, in God's Providence, it happened only nine years 

 after the authorized version of the Holy Scriptures was issued. 

 But few things have done more to extend the Anglo-Saxon 

 language and civilization than the fact that those Scriptures, 

 went forth in the hearts and lives and effects of those 1620 

 voyagers ! 



Take another illustration, which happens to come from a bit of 

 Greater Britain that I know very well : On the first of August, 

 1920 (which happened to be a Sunday), an interesting celebration 

 took place in the Island of Bermuda, which is within some 600 

 miles of Virginia in the North Atlantic — the last port at which the 

 Prince of Wales touched in his late tour. The whole Island — 

 Governor, Parliament, and people — went to church at, or gathered 

 round the very spot where, in 1620 (and on that day). King 

 James I had granted and established the first Parliament (outside 

 London) of the English people ! The Governor (Sir James 

 Wilcocks) had a great story to tell, and the sermon preached on 

 the occasion threw such light upon the spirit in which our brave 

 but unconscious pioneers went through the newly opened door, 

 that I must briefly quote. The Governor said : " Over 400 

 years ago, one Juan Bermudez, a Spaniard, had the good fortune 

 to sight these Islands. I can imagine his surprise, but I cannot 

 understand his want of taste in merely charting and then leaving 

 them. Could he have foreseen that the day would come when 

 Shakespeare would lay one of his immortal plays in these very 

 Islands, and Thomas More would sing from its shores, surely he 

 would have planted the flag of his most Catholic Majesty of 



