"TURN OR BURN"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 935, 12 July 1957, Page 13

"TURN OR BURN"

NICHOLAS RIDLEY, by Jasper Ridley; Longmans, English price 25/-. OME four hundred years ago Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer chose to die at the stake. An account of the processes leading to that choice is largely a history (continued on next page)

BO OKS

(continued from previous page) of the Reformation in England. Of the three, the least colourful and doctrinally the most important was Nicholas Ridley, whose biography has been written by Jasper Ridley, his nephew at many generations remove. It is not a "popular" biography; in some ways it is hardly a biography at all, for the depths and subtleties that lie beneath the records are unexplored. Born into the turbulence of the Northumbrian border, |jeducated and reaching eminence in a Cambridge rapidly swinging to the Left in theology, called upon to formulate doctrine for a reformation which acquired at least half its impetus from political expediency and _ back stairs diplomacy, and finally confronted by the appalling alternatives, what kind of a man was Ridley? Only the hints are here in this meticulous arrangement of historical data. Ridley was an intellectual, and, one imagines, frigid; a man of high principle and few friends. Prone to doubt in an age when doubt was either heresy or high treason, or both, he was unfortunate that his confession of doubt on the Real Presence led to his adoption as chief exponent and innovator in this crucial dogma while a humiliated princess awaited her revenge: It is to his credit that he had foreseen the crisis of his life, and met it with resolution. Not even he could have foreseen the prolonged horror of his death. Latimer’s ending was short; Cranmer had the example of his predecessors; Ridley’s was the supreme test of fortitude, the candle which "shall never be put out." Their martyrdom was the justification of the unhappy secular background which is more impressively documented in this

book,

J.R.

T.