to the ignorance upon which it rested, and which it tended to perpetuate. Its symbols were every where before the eyes of the people, and its practices dexterously interwoven with the daily business of life. While it lulled the conscience, it possessed the imagination and the heart. The Church was like a garden, in which things rank and gross in nature were running to seed; but they did not possess it wholly; it still produced beautiful flowers, and wholesome herbs and fruit.

When the abuses were most flagrant, and a spirit of enquiry had arisen with the restoration of letters, wise men would have weeded the garden, but rash ones were for going to work with the plough and the harrow. What was to be expected from the spirit which had gone abroad had been shown by the conduct of the Lollards in England, and more manifestly in Bohemia, by the bloody drama of the Hussite war. The most sagacious and even-minded men of the age, such as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, in their fear of religious revolution, and the inevitable evils which it would draw on, opposed the reform, which, but for that foresight, they would have desired and promoted. In this country the best people and the worst combined in bringing about the Reformation, and in its progress it bore evident marks of both. The business of demolition was successfully carried on by zealots, who lent their ignorant hands to aggrandize and enrich the rapacious and the * unprincipled; but the fa

"The untimely end of that good prince King Edward," says Burnet in the supplementary volume to his history (P. 216.), was looked

thers of the English Church were not permitted to complete the edifice which they would have raised from the ruins.

The lay impropriations, which are perhaps the best bulwarks of the Church in our distempered age, were, for a long time after the Reformation, a sore and scandalous evil. Where the monasteries had appropriated a benefice, they could always provide a fit preacher: and though they have been charged with giving scanty stipends to ignorant incumbents, and thus contributing greatly to the decay of learning, the justice of the accusation may be questioned. For though their object in obtaining these impropriations was that they might indulge in larger expenses, all those expenses were not unworthy ones, and it would be easy to show that literature must have gained more than it could possibly have lost by the transfer. But when, at the dissolution of the monasteries, their property was distributed among those who possessed favour or interest at court, and, as was proverbially said, Popish lands made Protestant landlords, the consequences of that abominable robbery were soon perceived. Men who had en

upon by all people as a just judgement of God upon those who pretended to love and promote a reformation, but whose impious and flagitious lives were a reproach to it. The open lewdness in which many lived, without shame or remorse, gave great occasion to their adversaries to say they were in the right to assert justification by faith without works, since they were, as to every good work, reprobate. Their gross and insatiable scrambling after the goods and wealth that had been dedicated with good designs, though to superstitious uses, without applying any part of it to the promoting the gospel, the instructing the youth, and relieving the poor, made all people conclude, that it was for robbery, and not for reformation, that their zeal made them so active."

riched themselves by sacrilege supported the new establishment, because it warranted their ill-gotten estates their conduct evinced that they were not influenced by any better motives. In many places the churches were suffered to fall to decay; and cures so impoverished, as no longer to afford the minister a decent subsistence, were given to any persons who could be found miserable enough to accept them. That opinion, which had accustomed the people to look upon religious * poverty with respect, was removed at the very time when the great body of the parochial clergy were thus reduced to abject poverty; and at the same time the clergy were permitted to marry, which rendered their poverty more conspicuous and less endurable.

* Archbishop Leighton (a man who ought never to be named without some expression of respect for his wisdom and his holiness) used to say, "The corruptions and cruelties of Popery were such gross and odious things, that nothing could have maintained that Church under those just and visible prejudices, but the several orders among them, which had an appearance of mortification and contempt of the world, and, with all the trash that was among them, maintained a face of piety and devotion. He also thought the great and fatal error of the Reformation was, that more of those houses, and of that course of life, free from the entanglements of vows and other mixtures, was not preserved; so that the Protestant churches had neither places of education, nor retreat for men of mortified tempers."

Burnet's Hist. of his Own Time, Vol. i. p. 175. (edition 1815.) Burnet himself also saw the good which the Romish Church derived from these orders, notwithstanding the villainous impostures and loathsome trash with which they were polluted." "The whole body of Protestants," he says, "if united, might be an equal match to the Church of Rome: it is much superior to them in wealth and in force, if it were animated with the zeal which the monastic orders, but chiefly the Jesuits, spread through their whole communion: whereas the reformed are cold and unconcerned, as well as disjointed in matters that relate to religion."

See also, upon this subject, what is said in the Quarterly Review, vol. xix. p. 89.

*

The Reformation, like other great political revolutions, was produced by the zeal and boldness of an active minority. The great mass of the people throughout England were attached to the Catholic superstition, and most strongly so to those parts of it which were most superstitious. They were brought over from it just as Julian intended to bring over the Christians from Christianity, by prohibiting their ancient practices, and depriving them of their former course of instruction, rather than by the zeal and ability of new teachers. Under the papal system more had latterly been done by the regular than by the secular clergy; but by the suppression of the regulars, the number of religious instructors was reduced to less than half the former establishment, and they who remained were left to labour with diminished ardour in a wider field. For a twofold evil was produced by the violence of the struggle and its long continuance. Those members of the priesthood who had entered with most feeling upon their holy office, who were most conscious of its duties, or who had applied themselves with most vigour to theological studies, took their part either for or against the Reformation; and on the one side or the other a large proportion of them suffered martyrdom or exile, both parties being too sincere not to understand and avow, that, upon their view of the question, it was as much a religious duty to inflict, as to suffer persecution. But the ignorant, the lukewarm, the time

* Bishop Jewel said, in one of his letters, that" if they had more hands matters would go well: but it was hard to make a cart go without horses."

servers, and many whom a pardonable weakness, or a humble distrust of their own frail judgement, withheld from taking a decided part, kept their station*, and performed the old service or the new with equal obedience; many indeed with equal indifference: but there is reason to believe that many were attached in secret to the old system, not merely because while it existed they had been more respected and better paid, but because they had grown up in it, and an acquiescence in its exploded tenets had become the rooted habits of their minds. They lived in hope of another change, which was always expected while the presumptive heiress of the crown was a Romanist; they dared not openly inculcate the old faith, but assuredly they used no efforts for establishing the people in scriptural truths contrary to the errors with which they themselves were possessed; and if the reformed service appeared dry and meagre in their churches, and their ministry was as ineffectual as it was insincere and heartless, this was what they desired.

This farther evil ensued; the worldly motives which had induced parents to educate their children for the clerical profession were withdrawn. The means for assisting poor scholars were lamentably diminished. The church no longer offered power

* The number of the secular clergy was about 9400, and of these scarcely 200 were deprived by the establishment of the Church under Elizabeth; the rest conformed as they had done under Queen Mary, and as many of them would again have done if the country had been cursed (according to their hopes) with a second of the name, It does not appear that any of the inferior clergy were deprived.