Thomas Bennet
THOMAS BENNET
Thomas Bennet was born in Cambridge and made a master of arts there. The more he grew in the knowledge of God and His holy Word, the more he came to abhor the time’s corrupt state of religion until, hoping to live with more freedom of conscience, he left the university and moved to Exeter in 1524, where he became a teacher.
Bennet was a quiet man whose greatest pleasure was attending sermons. In his spare time, he studied the scripture privately, not sharing his views with anyone until he was sure they felt as he did. But every tree and herb has its due time for bringing forth fruit, so did Bennet. Seeing the glory of God blasphemed, idolatrous religion maintained, and the power of the pope extolled, he finally decided he had to speak out, even though he knew he would be punished. In October, he fastened to the doors of the cathedral a scroll that said, “The pope is Antichrist, and we ought to worship God only, not saints.”
As soon as the message was found, the authorities attempted to find the heretic who had posted it. Bennet quietly went about his life, attending services and teaching his students while church and secular authorities looked for the culprit. But Bennet was such a quiet, faithful man that no one would ever suspect him of doing such a bold, dangerous thing.
After a while, when it had no success finding the heretic, the church decided to publicly curse him or her with book, bell, and candle—considered in those days to be the most terrible curse of all. Bennet sat in the congregation and heard himself excommunicated, given over to the devil, and deprived of the benefits of the church’s pardon for his sins. All the powers of the corrupted church were invoked against him: the saints, the pope, the monks and friars—everything that Bennet considered worthless, anyway.
The congregation was sitting silently, awed by this display of the church’s wrath and hoping none of it fell on them by mistake, when Bennet, suddenly seeing the irony of the situation, began to laugh. Once started, he couldn’t seem to stop, and he was apprehended as the heretic the church was damning so theatrically. When his friends later asked him why he’d betrayed himself by laughing in church, Bennet replied, “Who could keep from laughing at their little conceits and interludes?” At his trial he confessed, “It was I who put up those bills, and I would do it again, for what I wrote is true.”
At his execution, Bennet exhorted the people to worship and know the true God, forsaking the devices, fantasies, and imagination of the church. Most of the people there, including the scribe who wrote his death sentence, were convinced that Bennet was a good man and a servant of God.