to the aspiring, dignity to the proud, ease and comfort to easy men, and opportunities of learning and leisure to those of a. higher nature; but it held forth a prospect of the most imminent and appalling danger-fear, insecurity, the prison and the stake. Formerly the monasteries as well as the churches had been filled; but for this reason few persons were to be found who were qualified for orders, at a time when they were most wanted, and the few who had been regularly bred would not accept of benefices upon which they could not subsist with respectability. The greatest part of the country clergy were so ignorant that they could do little more than read; many of them were carpenters and tailors, having taken to these employments because they could not subsist upon their

The vacancies happened also to be far more numerous than usual. In the first year of Elizabeth's reign" the realm had been extremely visited with a dangerous and contagious sickness, which took away almost half the bishops, and occasioned such mortality amongst the rest of the clergy, that a great part of the parochial clergy were without incumbents." (Heylyn's Hist. of the Presbyterians, p. 246.) The chroniclers make no mention of any pestilence in 1558, and perhaps that of 1562-3 may be meant.

In the parliament of 1563 the Speaker complained that owing to the prevalent fashion of expenditure, and the rapacity which was its consequence," many of the schools and benefices were seized, the education of youth disappointed, and the succours for knowledge cut off. For I dare aver," said he, " the schools in England are fewer than formerly by an hundred, and those which remain are many of them but slenderly stocked; and this is one reason the number of learned men is so remarkably diminished. The universities are decayed, and great market towns without either school or preacher; for the poor vicar is turned off with twenty pounds, and the bulk of the Church's patrimony is impropriated and diverted to foreign use. Thus the parish has no preacher, and thus, for want of a fund for instruction, the people are bred to ignorance and obstinacy." Collier's Ecclesiastical History, p. 480.

benefices, and some even kept ale-houses. During the first years of Elizabeth's reign, the service in many of the London parishes was performed by the sextons and in very many vicarages, some of them in good provincial towns, the people were forced to provide themselves as they could. In many places they found needy men, who though they were worthy of no higher station envied and hated those who were more prosperous than themselves, and these persons poisoned their parishioners with puritanical doctrines and puritanical politics, which from the beginning were naturally allied. And because of the want of unexceptionable subjects, men of learning but of tainted opinions found admittance into the church, and their zeal was more pernicious than the torpor of the papistical clergy.

Owing therefore to the indifference or incapacity of one part of the clergy, and to the temper of another, there was at the same time an increase of fanaticism and a decay of general piety in some places no care was taken to instruct the people, in others opinions the most hostile to established institutions were sedulously and perseveringly inculcated. And though from a sense of duty in the sovereign, as well as from motives of sound policy, the best and wisest men were selected for the highest offices of the church, even the transcendant talents called forth in its defence could not counteract the destructive principles which were at work. Political circumstances brought those principles into full play. Their tendency from the first had not been mistaken; indeed it had scarcely been

disguised. They produced in their progress rebellion and regicide; and if the schismatics who cordially co-operated for the overthrow of the altar and the throne, had not turned their malignant passions against each other as soon as the business of destruction was done, they would have established among us an ecclesiastical tyranny of the lowest and most loathsome kind, the only thing wanting to complete the punishment and the degradation of this guilty and miserable nation.

When these disturbances began, time had so far remedied the ill consequences attendant upon the Reformation, that though the evil resulting from the poverty of the inferior clergy and from their diminished numbers had not been remedied, a generation of clergymen had grown up, not inferior as a body to those of any age or country, in learning, in ability, or in worth. Their sincerity was put to the proof, and it appears that full twothirds of them were ejected for fidelity to their king and their holy office. Revolutions call forth heroic virtue at the beginning, but their progress tends to destroy all virtue, for they dislocate the foundations of morality. Reformed religion had not yet taken root in the hearts of the people; the lower classes were for the most part as ignorant of the essentials of religion as they had been in the days of popery, and they had none of that attachment to its forms, in which the strength of popery consists. Opinions were now perilously shaken and unsettled. During the anarchy that ensued, new sects sprang up like weeds in a neglected

garden. Many were driven mad by fanaticism, a disease which always rages in disordered times. Others were shocked at beholding how religion was made a cloak for ambition and villainy of every kind, and being deprived of their old teachers and properly disgusted with the new, they fell into a state of doubt, and from doubt into unbelief. A generation grew up under a system which had as far as possible deprived holiness of all its beauty; the yoke was too heavy, too galling, too ignominious to be borne: and when the Restoration put an end to the dominion of knaves and fanatics, it

* The conduct of the puritanical clergy during their reign is thus admirably described in a fragment said to have been written by Milton, and bearing strong marks of his style: "If the state were in this plight, religion was not in much better; to reform which, a certain number of divines were called, neither chosen by any rule or custom ecclesiastical, nor eminent for either piety or knowledge above others left out; only as each member of parliament in his private fancy thought fit, so elected one by one. The most part of them were such as had preached and cried down, with great shew of zeal, the avarice of bishops, and pluralities; that one cure of souls was a full employment for one spiritual pastor, how able soever, if not a charge rather above human strength. Yet these conscientious men (before any part of the work was done for which they came together, and that on the public salary) wanted not boldness, to the ignominy and scandal of their pastor-like profession, and especially of their boasted reformation, to seize into their hands, or not unwillingly to accept (besides one, sometimes two or more of the best livings) collegiate masterships in the universities, rich lectures in the city, setting sail to all winds that might blow gain into their covetous bosoms: by which means these great rebukers of non-residence, amongst so many distant cures, were not ashamed to be seen so quickly pluralists and non-residents themselves, to a fearful condemnation doubtless by their own mouths. And yet the main doctrine for which they took such pay, and insisted upon with more vehemence than gospel, was but to tell us in effect, that their doctrine was worth nothing, and the spiritual power of their ministry less available than bodily compulsion; persuading the magistrate to use it, as a stronger means to subdue and bring in conscience, than evangelical persuasion :

was soon perceived that the effect of such systems is to render religion odious by making piety suspected, and to prepare a people for licentiousness and atheism.

The circumstances which attended the restoration of the Church were in some respects similar

distrusting the virtue of their own spiritual weapons, which were given them, if they be rightly called, with full warrant of sufficiency to pull down all thoughts and imaginations that exalt themselves against God. But, while they taught compulsion without convincement, which not long before they complained of, as executed unchristianly, against themselves, their intents are clear to have been no better than anti-christian; setting up a spiritual tyranny by a secular power, to the advancing of their own authority above the magistrate whom they would have made their executioner to punish church delinquencies, whereof civil laws have no cognizance.

"And well did their disciples manifest themselves to be no better principled than their teachers, trusted with committeeships and other gainful offices, upon their commendations for zealous (and as they sticked not to term them) godly men, but executing their places like children of the devil, unfaithfully, unjustly, unmercifully, and, where not corruptly, stupidly; so that, between them the teachers, and these the disciples, there hath not been a more ignominious and mortal wound to faith, to piety, to the work of reformation; nor more cause of blaspheming given to the enemies of God and truth, since the first preaching of reformation. The people, therefore, looking one while on the statists, whom they beheld without constancy or firmness, labouring doubtfully beneath the weight of their own too high undertakings, busiest in petty things, trifling in the main, deluded and quite alienated, expressed divers ways their disaffection, some despising whom before they honoured, some deserting, some inveighing, some conspiring against them. Then looking on the churchmen, whom they saw under subtile hypocrisy, to bave preached their own follies most of them, not the gospel; time-servers, covetous, illiterate, persecutors, not lovers of the truth; like in most things whereof they accused their predecessors: looking on all this, the people, which had been kept warm a-while with the counterfeit zeal of their pulpits, after a false heat, became more cold and obdurate than before, some turning to lewdness, some to flat atheism, put beside their old religion, and foully scandalized in, what they expected should be new." Harleian Miscellany, 8vo. edition, vol. v. p. 39.