Lewis Bayly (1) (–1631)

The popular work, entitled the Practice of Piety, by Bishop Bayly, is stated to have been the substance of several sermons which the bishop preached when he was minister of Evesham in Worcestershire. So great was at one time the popularity of this work that John D Espagne, a French preacher at Somerset Chapel in 1656, complained in the pulpit that the generality of the common people paid too great a regard to it and considered the authority of it as almost equal to that of the Scriptures. The work went through a prodigious number of editions and was translated into the Welsh and French in 1653. Source: Google Books,The Percy Anecdotes Original and Select… (altro)