The claim of the sixteenth-century Reformers to return to the teaching of the primitive Church by the aid of the written Scriptures is still heard today, but not so often as formerly, because the spirit of liberal criticism has completely undermined that reverent confidence in the Word of God which was once so strong in the children of the Reformation. As The Times (London) confessed not long ago, ‘to the majority of Englishmen the open Bible is now a closed book…. The popular mind at present takes for granted that the Bible has been fatally discredited and that “nobody now believes that kind of thing”. The Reformers have handed the Church (the writer means the non-Catholic churches, of course) today a problem which they could not have foreseen. Rejecting both the papal usurpation ano the late-medieval abuses and corruptions, they sought to recover a “pure” Christianity.