April 1, 1837.

The publishers have great pleasure in offering to the public, the following notices of this work. They feel well assured, that the well known character of the sources from which they come, will secure for them all the attention and credit which can be desired.

Gambier, Feb. 24, 1837.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall & Co.

Gentlemen:—You are perfectly welcome to the use of my name, in recommendation of the “Library of Christian Knowledge,” so far as it has been published, as a valuable depositary of the precious things of “the glorious Gospel of the blessed God;” to which no inquiring mind can apply in a prayerful spirit, without edification. Though I know not what works are to follow, I have entire confidence, that the editor, the Rev. H. Hooker, will select such only, as will be “for the edifying of the body of Christ.” Yours, very truly,

CHARLES P. M’ILVAINE, D. D.

Bishop of Ohio.

St. Mary’s Parsonage, Burlington, 30th March, 1837.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall & Co.

At a time when the country is inundated with a flood of trash, I have regarded your proposal to publish a Library of Christian Knowledge, as an auspicious sign of the times; and I most heartily bid you “God speed!” in your commendable enterprise. Thus far, my numerous avocations have prevented my particular attention to the volumes which compose it, and I can, therefore, speak with confidence only of two of the series. The volume which you have now in press, Blunt’s Sketch of the Reformation in England, I have long considered among the most valuable books which the Church of England, fruitful in all good works, has lately produced; and the volume entitled, Popular Infidelity, written for the series by my accomplished and intelligent friend, the Editor, will take its place among the standard books of our language. If, indeed, I had seen none of the series, such is my confidence, founded on long and intimate acquaintance, in the Rev. Herman Hooker, who has charge of it, that I should not hesitate to commend the undertaking to the confidence of the Church, and to the acceptance of the whole community. Praying fervently that He, who in every good work gives the increase, may direct this Christian enterprise, and make it promotive of the Gospel in the Church, I remain very respectfully yours,

G. W. DOANE, D. D.

Bishop of New Jersey.

Philadelphia, Feb. 8, 1837.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall, & Co.

Gentlemen:—In reply to your communication, in reference to the “Library of Christian Knowledge,” edited by the Rev. Herman Hooker, I take pleasure in saying, that I regard it as one of the most valuable and substantial publications of the present day. The original works from the pen of the talented editor, I regard, as among the ablest productions of modern times; and his excellent taste has led him to select from the English writers, some of the richest stores of theological truth. I rejoice to know, that this work is to be continued, and I wish it all success. In my view, both the editor and the publisher, are conferring upon the country a rich blessing in this publication.

JOHN A. CLARK,

Rector of St. Andrew’s Church, Philadelphia.

Princeton, N. J. Feb. 18, 1837.

The “Library of Christian Knowledge,” edited by the Rev. Herman Hooker, and published by Marshall & Co. in a series of small volumes, is upon a plan well calculated to be useful. The publication of religious treatises, characterised by sound evangelical sentiments, and animated with the spirit of genuine piety, cannot but be highly beneficial to the Christian community.

The five volumes of this series which have been already published, meet with my cordial approbation; and if these may be considered a fair specimen of those which are to follow, the work may be safely recommended, as furnishing materials for a valuable Christian Library.

A. ALEXANDER,

Prof. of Didactic Theology, in the Theological Seminary, Princeton.

Princeton, Feb. 16, 1837.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall & Co.

Gentlemen:—I have attended with much interest to the volumes of the “Library of Christian Knowledge,” as they have successively appeared; and exceedingly rejoice, both in the plan of the work, and thus far, in its execution. I have a high opinion of the piety and the talents of the Rev. Mr. Hooker, the editor, and consider him as well qualified to conduct a work of this nature. If the future volumes should bear a stamp similar to that of those which have hitherto appeared, I shall be glad—and every friend of genuine Christianity, I should hope, would be glad—to see them universally circulated. Wishing you, and the excellent editor, every encouragement in this publication, I am, gentlemen, respectfully yours,

SAMUEL MILLER,

Professor of Eccl. History in the Theological Seminary, Princeton.

Philadelphia, March 2, 1837.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall & Co.

Gentlemen:—I have just received your communication of the 28th ult. respecting the “Library of Christian Knowledge,” now in the course of publication by you. I had supposed that the work had already established for itself such a character, as to need no recommendation from any quarter. But, as you are pleased to suppose that my opinion of it, may be of some use in aiding its circulation, I cannot refuse to give it to you. And I can truly say, that, judging from the character of the works already published in the series, I think it a most valuable publication; and one well calculated to introduce and cherish a taste for literature of a high order, and for religious sentiments, the most evangelical and pure. As to the Rev. Mr. Hooker, your editor, I regard him as one of our most accomplished and intellectual men. Any thing that he adjudges fit for the press, and any thing that comes from his pen, has for me sufficient recommendation in that very fact. His name ought to be, for any work, a full passport to the confidence of the public. His work on “Popular Infidelity,” alone, which makes up your fifth volume, is of itself sufficient to secure him a high and lasting reputation, as a man of profound thinking, of very great logical power, and of very enviable literary attainments. I think that volume alone will be worth the price of the whole set. Wishing you success in your laudable enterprise, I am, gentlemen, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

HENRY W. DUCACHET, M. D.

Rector of St. Stephens, Philadelphia.

Philadelphia, March 17, 1837.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall & Co.

Gentlemen:—I have read several of the volumes of the “Library of Christian Knowledge,” edited by the Rev. H. Hooker, and desire to express my strong sense of the importance of the project, and of the worth of the books, which have been published. It is a very important design which proposes to turn the reading of the religious community, from the lighter works of imagination which have been rather gaining in popularity among such readers, to a grave and instructive class of books. I consider Mr. Hooker’s selection, to have been eminently judicious, as far as regards the real improvement of his readers; though I should not be surprised, if some less useful works, should outstrip these, in the market. The worth of a book is too much determined, by the way it sells. If the actual value is the standard of estimation, the Library of Christian Knowledge, will stand very high. Respectfully yours,

STEPHEN H. TYNG, D. D.

From the Rev. Charles Henry Alden, A. M. Principal of the Philadelphia High School for Young Ladies, No. 6 Portico Square.

As editor of the “Library of Christian Knowledge,” it is difficult to conceive of one better qualified in all respects, than the Rev. Mr. Hooker. Remarkable for his mental discipline; familiar with our literature, and especially with the higher order of Theological Letters; habitually conversant with principles of human nature, and embracing in his wishes to benefit others, all sensible and good men, he has rendered a most acceptable service to your readers, and secured an enviable distinction to himself.

The selected works so far are, in my judgment, most excellent. “M’Laurin’s Essays” can never be depreciated but by such as have no sympathy with intellectual elevation and manly piety. “Goode’s Better Covenant” has already passed to the second edition; and few men of intelligence, but must admire its chaste, simple and manly style; and its clear discrimination and affecting views of Christian doctrines and Christian duties. “Russell’s Letters,” comprising No. 3 and 4, are of far more extensive application than their title imports. No person of reflection, whether he be a religious man or not, can fail of finding both interest and profit in the reading. No. 5, Mr. Hooker’s original work, has been so recently published, and so extensively spoken well of, that I will say only, that if a man desires the best of company, in which he will find what will please and improve and dignify, during his reading hours, let him discourse with “Hooker’s Popular Infidelity.” Yours, very respectfully,

CHARLES HENRY ALDEN.

Feb. 20, 1837.

Baltimore, Feb. 15, 1837.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall & Co.

Gentlemen:—In answer to yours of the 4th inst. it gives me pleasure to state, that I have read the volumes of the “Library of Christian Knowledge,” already published, and am gratified that evangelical works of such distinguished merit have been offered to the reading community in a form so popular and attractive. You have done well, I think, in securing the editorial services of the talented author of “The Portion of the Soul,” and “Popular Infidelity,” whose well known taste and established orthodoxy, give assurance that he will select no works, that will not be worthy of perusal, and well adapted to the peculiar wants of the church, at this interesting period.

I am happy to find, that you design to continue the publication of the Library, and sincerely hope that you will be sustained in it by the liberal patronage of the Christian public. Yours, respectfully,

J. P. K. HENSHAW, D. D.

Philadelphia, March 13th, 1837.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall & Co.

Gentlemen:—I am gratified to learn, that you are about issuing a sixth volume of your “Library of Christian Knowledge.” The volumes already published constitute a very valuable accession to our stock of religious literature, and are worthy of a place in every Christian family. The editor is well known to the public, as the author of several practical works of great value; and I am acquainted with no man who is better qualified than himself, to superintend a publication of the kind in question. Believing as I do, that you are very effectually promoting the interests of true religion, by placing within the reach of American Christians, such works as those contemplated in the plan of your library, I trust the enterprise will receive a liberal and growing patronage, which will enable you to make it, in extent as well as in character, a complete “Library of Christian Knowledge.” I am, very respectfully, yours, &c.

H. A. BOARDMAN,

Pastor of the Tenth Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia.

Baltimore, Feb. 27th, 1837.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall & Co.

Gentlemen:—I am extremely sorry, that it is not in my power to comply with the request contained in your letter. The difficulty arises from no indisposition to accommodate you, nor from any want of confidence in the work, with which you are furnishing the public, but simply from the fact, that I have only the last three volumes of the series, and of these, have been so situated, as to have read only volumes three and four. If I had the leisure at present, it would give me pleasure to procure and peruse the others; and then forward you the recommendation, which I am sure I should feel authorised to give.

“Russell’s Letters,” I have read with more satisfaction than I have derived from most of the modern publications which have come under my notice; and I do not hesitate to say, that the pleasure of perusing those two volumes, would be an equivalent for the price of the five. In the competency of the editor to continue the series, I have full confidence. He has given sufficient proof in the character of the selections already made. I am therefore gratified to learn that the “Library of Christian Knowledge” is to be enlarged. In haste, yours truly,

J. JOHNS, D. D.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall & Co.

Gentlemen:—Your favour of the 13th inst. was duly received. But the engagements of the season, through which we have been passing, must be my apology for not sooner returning an answer.

I have not read all the volumes of “The Library of Christian Knowledge,” but what I have read, and especially what I know of their able and pious editor, and of his writings, make me confident in saying that the series which he is engaged in publishing, will prove a valuable addition to the religious literature of the country. We need a multiplication of such men as Mr. Hooker, and of such works as he writes and publishes; and this need should lead us to receive most thankfully, and improve most faithfully, so far as it shall extend the rich supply which he is furnishing. Very respectfully, your friend,

JOHN I. STONE,

Rector of St. Paul’s Church, Boston.

March 27th, 1837.

Philadelphia, March 31, 1837.

Messrs. Wm. Marshall & Co.

Gentlemen:—Few men exert a more decided, extensive, and lasting influence upon society than Booksellers; and in these times, when so many prostitute the press to gratify and increase the appetite for books that are worthless, or decidedly immoral in their tendency; it is exceedingly gratifying to find here a firm, who bring nothing before the world which can injure their race. So far as I have noticed, you have as yet published nothing at which you need blush, should you meet the book on the parlour table of your best friend.

Among others of your productions, I have read your “Library of Christian Knowledge,” edited by Mr. Hooker. Ever since I read the little work of Mr. H. entitled “The Portion of the Soul,” I have felt sure, that he was safe; by which I mean, that any work to which he might prefix his name, would be a sound, discreet, judicious book. His taste is correct, discriminating; and his own pen at times, is guided by a hand of no ordinary strength. Honestly attached to the Episcopal Church, he, nevertheless, is so endowed with the limbs of a man, and the heart of a Christian, that his denominational habits do not hinder him from appearing in a working dress, in the vineyard of his Master. I can sincerely recommend the “Library,” as containing such works of practical piety, as will be useful in every family, and I could wish that the circulation of such works might banish the light reading of the age. I hope your circulation will be very extensive. Respectfully yours,

J. TODD.

THE LIBRARY OF CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE. Edited by the Rev. Herman Hooker, A. M. Author of “The Portion of the Soul,” &c.

Four volumes of this series have appeared, and if we may consider these as a specimen of the work, we congratulate the Christian public on the prospect of being supplied from time to time, with a rich feast of evangelical matter, calculated to give nourishment and refreshment to the spiritual life of believers.

M’Laurin’s Essays is not a recent work, but the lapse of years can never destroy its value. While the observations of the author are strictly orthodox, they are philosophical, and if read with candour and attention, must have a powerful effect in correcting mistakes and expelling prejudices where they have been imbibed, and in enlightening the mind, and invigorating the faith of the sincere Christian. We would strongly recommend the perusal and reperusal of these essays to the young theologian. Too great a proportion of time, we fear, is spent by the young ministers of our day in light reading, which, while it gratifies a prurient curiosity, has no tendency to strengthen the mind. The effect produced is superficial knowledge, and a distaste for deep and solid research. Religious people are now distinguished for bustling activity and a show of benevolence and zeal; but there exists a sad deficiency of profound and systematic knowledge even in those who have enjoyed the advantages of a liberal education.

The whole life and energies of M’Laurin were devoted to the highest good of his fellow men; and this lovely principle beams forth brightly in his works. Originality, truth, and beauty, are prominent characteristics of his writings. * * His elements of thought, from whatever source they are drawn, from external Nature, from the exercises and sentiments of the soul, or from the mysteries of redemption, are formed into complete emblems of the richness and peculiarity of the mind from which they proceed. The advantages of a well balanced mind, of a proper discipline of all the powers, and a nice adjustment of them to each other, is strikingly seen in these essays.

In conclusion, we would say the richness and power of thought, the simplicity and greatness of conception in M’Laurin can be realised only by his readers; and to those who would study the revelation of God to man, in its symmetry, its magnitude, its intrinsic excellence, “its easy, free, and unincumbered plan,” these essays will be a most powerful assistance.—N. Y. Literary and Theological Review.

Library of Christian Knowledge, Vols. 3, 4, 5; Edited by Rev. Herman Hooker. Philadelphia: W. Marshall, 1836.—This series is, as a course of rare and valuable works in the practical department of theology, far in advance of any that has ever been published in the United States. “M’Laurin’s Essays,” and “Goode’s Better Covenant,” the first of the course, are intellectually and evangelically works of such high character, and withal, so little known hitherto to the American public, that Mr. Hooker has already won for his “Library” golden opinions, and the announcement of a new volume of the series, is taken by the reading community as an invitation to a spiritual and intellectual banquet, where “nothing common or unclean” will be presented to the taste. Vols. 3 and 4 contain “Letters Practical and Consolatory; designed to illustrate the nature and Tendency of the Gospel; by the Rev. David Russell, D. D.; with an Introductory Essay, by the Rev. H. A. Boardman, Philadelphia.” The hasty glance which we have had opportunity to bestow on these volumes, has satisfied us that they are worthy successors to those of the series already before the public. This is sufficient praise. The 5th volume contains an essay by the Editor, the Rev. Herman Hooker, A. M. on “Popular Infidelity.” Mr. Hooker is already extensively and favourably known as an author, through his work, entitled “The Portion of the Soul.” We have read his volume on “Popular Infidelity,” much to our pleasure and edification. Mr. Hooker has a clear and philosophical mind, which analyses truth to its simplest elements, and presents it in pure, plain, Saxon English.—Christian Witness, Boston, Aug. 12, 1836.

THE BETTER COVENANT PRACTICALLY CONSIDERED. By the Rev. Francis Goode. Vol. 2, Library of Christian Knowledge.

The Better Covenant.—This work of the Rev. Francis Goode, has recently been published as the second volume of the Library of Christian Knowledge, by Messrs. W. Marshall & Co. of this city. The best characteristic of the work probably is, its faithful development of Scriptural truth, in language entirely appropriate to the importance of the subject, while it is so clear and satisfactory as to be easily understood by the plainest reader. Its character in other respects is well and justly expressed in the letter of Bishop M’Ilvaine contained in the preface.—Episcopal Recorder.

From the N. Y. Christian Intelligencer.

The Better Covenant.—We have read this work, of which we had not previously heard, with great and unmingled pleasure. It has reminded us of Jewell, Hopkins, Leighton, &c. of the church of which he is a member, in generations gone by, as well as Owen, Flava, &c. among the non-conformists, as it unfolded the choicest of matter, of sound evangelical doctrine moulded in the happiest form of experience, and practice. The author is at present lecturer at Clapham, known to many as the residence of Wilberforce, Thornton, and others greatly distinguished by piety and philanthropy, and was formerly lecturer in the mission church in Calcutta. Bishop M’Ilvaine in a recommendatory letter thus speaks of it: “As a book of divinity; divinity as it should be, not cold, and abstract and dead, freezing the affections while it exercises the intellect, but retaining the living beauty, and heart affecting interest of the revelation it proceeds from—divinity adapted to the intellectual wants of the closest students of divine truth, which provides the simplest, and sweetest nourishment for the spiritual necessities of the humblest Christian;—As a book of practical piety, especially in regard to the display it gives of the nothingness of the sinner out of Christ, and the completeness of the believer in Christ, and its tendency to promote a spirit of active, cheerful obedience, by all those motives of thankfulness, love, peace, and joyful hope, which belong to the adoption of sons—I know of no book of the present age more valuable. Students of divinity will find it a book to be studied. Readers of devotional writings will find it full of divine knowledge, of experimental truth, and of excitements to prayer, and praise.” With this strong recommendation of Bishop M’Ilvaine, we feel ourselves willing to accord.

The first volume of the series of the Library of religious knowledge, is M’Laurin’s Essays, a work of acknowledged standard excellence. If the succeeding volumes should be equally valuable with the two already published, the series will have a just claim upon the patronage of our religious public. We have seen it stated that it is designed to introduce into the series, Letters on Religious Subjects, by the Rev. David Russell, of Dundee, Scotland, a work little known to American Christians, but of very sterling merit.

From the Episcopal Recorder.

The Better Covenant Practically Considered.—The above is the title of a work which has recently been published in this city, as the third volume of the Christian Family Library, edited by the Rev. Herman Hooker. The author is the Rev. Francis Goode, of the Church of England, an accomplished scholar, and most devout and godly man. Many excellent treatises upon practical and experimental religion have been issued from the press within the last few years, but none that we have seen is at all to be compared with this. Indeed, we think it decidedly the best book of the kind we have ever read. We know of none in which the glory and excellency of Christ’s salvation is so clearly, fully and delightfully presented to the mind. Throughout, Christ crucified is all in all to the sinner’s soul. Accordingly, as it richly deserves, it is spoken of in the highest terms of commendation, by both clergy and laity. Some of the former, believing that they could not in any other way more effectually preach the Gospel in all its freeness and richness, have even recommended it from the pulpit to their congregations.

We would wish to see his book in every family in the land. We are deeply persuaded that no Christian could rise from its perusal without more enlarged and affecting views of what his Saviour had done for him, without more humility, penitence and gratitude to God, and without a more fixed determination, or divine aid, to follow on to know the Lord and to be filled with all the fullness of God.

Goode’s Better Covenant.—We have had but little time to examine this book; but have seen enough of it to desire the opportunity of giving it an attentive perusal. It is undoubtedly a good book, written by one who gives strong evidence of his own personal interest in the better Covenant than the covenant of works. He is much of an old fashioned divine for one of modern times, who makes Christ all in all in the sinner’s salvation. The edition of Goode, published by Wm. Marshall, Philadelphia, contains a preface and table of contents, by the Rev. Herman Hooker.—Philadelphian.

Goode’s Better Covenant.—This volume is made up of Lectures by the Rev. Francis Goode, a clergyman of the Church of England, on portions of the 8th chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, and portions of his Epistle to the Philippians. Mr. Goode is understood to be one of the brightest spiritual lights of the mother Church. The introduction by Mr. Hooker, contains a letter of Bishop M’Ilvaine, in which he expresses great satisfaction in view of the republication of the work in this country, and classes the author with the Bickersteths, Noels, Melvilles and Wilsons of the Church of England. We have not had opportunity to read the book in course, but have formed a high estimate of its intellectual and evangelical excellence from the parts which have fallen under our notice.—Christian Witness.

The author of this work is a clergyman of the Church of England. This book is replete with practical thought and instruction on some of the most important doctrines of Christianity. It is a work which it gives us a pleasure to recommend to readers in every church, and of every class. We have copied an extract from it on the first page of this paper, under the head of “Views of Doctrine.”—So. Religious Telegraph, June 10, 1836.

We have read this book with great pleasure. The author, a clergyman of the Church of England, appears to have learned from the Bible the same great truths of Christianity which strongly mark the writings of John Calvin, Leighton and Owen. Bishop M’Ilvaine says, “I am truly rejoiced, that the theological literature of this country is to be enriched with the addition of so excellent a work.”—Sold at the Bookstores of Messrs. Yale & Wyatt.—So. Religious Telegraph.

Library of Christian Knowledge.—This will undoubtedly prove to be a most valuable series of books. The editor is, at once, a man of genius, taste and erudition, and we are quite sure that no work will bear his name as editor, which is not possessed of sterling merit. Two volumes of this series have already appeared: the first, M’Laurin’s Essays, we noticed some time since as a volume rich in profound and valuable thought; the second, “Goode’s Better Covenant,” is now before us. The writer is a living divine of the Church of England, but the book has nothing in it of a sectarian character. Bishop M’Ilvaine (in a letter to the Editor) says, “As a book of practical piety, I know of no book of the present age more valuable.” This certainly is high praise and comes from a high source: if we do not esteem the work quite as highly as the Bishop, (perhaps because we have not studied it as carefully,) we are fully prepared to pronounce it a most excellent book. We understand that another volume is nearly ready for publication, which is to be followed by an original work on Infidelity from the pen of the accomplished editor.—Boston Traveller.

This volume cannot be read by the pious without sensible profit. It breathes the very spirit of ardent piety, and directs continually to Christ, as the only source of strength and growth in grace. The kind of faith here inculcated, is not a cold rational assent to general propositions, but a cordial, living principle of action, the exercise of which is commonly accompanied with a sweet persuasion of pardon and acceptance. Nothing animates and encourages the pious soul in its spiritual pilgrimage so much, as the smiles of the great Captain of Salvation.—Biblical Repertory, Princeton.

LETTERS PRACTICAL AND CONSOLATORY, DESIGNED TO ILLUSTRATE THE NATURE AND TENDENCY OF THE GOSPEL. By the Rev. David Russell, D. D. with an Introductory Essay, by the Rev. Henry A. Boardman. Vol. 3 and 4, Library of Christian Knowledge.

We are much gratified that the theological writings of the Rev. Doctor Russell of Dundee, begin to attract the attention of American readers. The editor could not easily have hit upon a work better adapted to instruct and comfort the pious reader, than these small volumes of letters. They are, we think, the best productions of the gifted author’s pen. They appear to have been written in the course of a real correspondence, which gives them a greater freedom of style than could easily be attained in letters originally intended for the press. Though the letters are practical, and particularly suited to afford rich consolation to the children of sorrow, they are nevertheless eminently instructive. There are few books from which a clearer idea can be obtained of the doctrines of the Christian system than from these Letters. They contain, as do his other writings, the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ. The peculiar excellency of these volumes is, that you have the truth exhibited, not in a controversial or even a systematic form, but in its practical bearings, as a guide both to faith and practice. The style is clear, concise, and easy; and possesses a vivacity which keeps up the interest of the reader.—Biblical Repertory and Theological Review.

Russell’s Letters, Practical and Consolatory, designed to illustrate the nature and tendency of the Gospel, with an introductory Essay by the Rev. H. A. Boardman; forming volumes 3d and 4th of the Library of Christian Knowledge; edited by Rev. Herman Hooker. This work has just been issued by the enterprising publishers, Wm. Marshall & Co. The Introductory Essay is a well written exposition of the characteristics of the work, abounding with specimens of the happy style and temper of the author. He expresses the opinion that no work of recent origin is so worthy to be read and admired by all classes of Christians as these letters of Dr. Russell. The examination which we have given them leaves us with the opinion that this is a just estimate of their value. The Letters are written in a natural, intelligible, and appropriate style. A spirit of ardent, simple, and affectionate piety runs through them, which must win the confidence and awaken the interest of the reader. The author has published several other works, all of which are in high repute; but his Letters have, perhaps, been more popular, and more extensively circulated than any other of his productions.—Commercial Herald.

Russell’s Letters, in two volumes, exhibit, in a chaste and intelligible style, the most important features in the plan of redemption and of Christian duty. The letters were actually addressed to an individual, previous to publication, for this purpose; a circumstance which has been justly thought calculated to ensure for them a peculiarly practical character. Those who desire clear and profitable instruction upon the subject of religion, from an original, but judicious, well balanced and pious mind, will not be disappointed in perusing Russell’s Letters.—Episcopal Recorder.

The Rev. Mr. Boardman thus speaks, in his Introductory Essay, of the author and his works:—“The name of Dr. Russell is familiar to the friends of Christ throughout the united kingdom—and his eminent piety, talents, and usefulness have placed him in the front rank of those celebrated divines, who are justly regarded as an ornament of his country, and an invaluable blessing to the age. His various writings are held in high estimation on the other side of the Atlantic, and it is not a little surprising that the extensive circulation which they have had there, has not led to an earlier republication of them in the United States. This series of Letters is perhaps the most interesting of all his works. Those who may peruse it, will not deem the opinion an extravagant one, that it will hereafter rank with the standard volumes on practical religion, which find a place in every Christian Library.”

POPULAR INFIDELITY. By the Rev. Herman Hooker, M. A. Vol. 5, Library of Christian Knowledge.

When, in our first volume, we took notice of the Rev. Mr. Hooker’s “Portion of the Soul,” we expressed the hope, that, from the golden vein thus opened, we should have other and richer specimens—and we ventured to predict, that, the more it should be worked, the finer would be the ingot. We are proud to record our predictions. In the present volume our most golden dreams are more than realized. It is a book of an age; and we will say of a better age—“specimen melioris ævi.” It shall be taken down, in the dark, from the same shelf on which the writings of South, Taylor, Barrow, Boyle, Bates, and How, repose in glory unsurpassed of earth; and shall be replaced again, when read, by the most ardent lover of them all, as worthy of the high companionship. We know what we have said, and we challenge doubters to the proof.

It is the object of the author to unmask that secret infidelity of the heart, of which St. Paul gives admonition, in his epistle to the Hebrews—“Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God”—and he has well accomplished it. His pen seems an Ithuriel’s spear, to strip the subtle fraud, which he pursues with singular skill, of all its multiplied disguises. His page teems with illustrations, the rarest, the aptest, and the most beautiful, of his important theme. It is impossible, plain as the truths are which he speaks, to be offended with him, from the pure benevolence which is felt to be his prompter; and, such the vein of keen, but half repressed and silent, humour which pervades the book, that, once taken up, it is impossible to lay it down till it is finished. We began to mark the passages which, for the thought or the expression, struck us, as we read, by turning down the leaf; and the volume lies before us, increased by half its thickness. To review it, as it deserves, is not within the compass of our craft. Not to commend it to universal notice, would be to do our readers an unpardonable injustice. There was great want of such a book, which, by its engaging character, should tempt men to become acquainted with themselves—which should expose the vanity and recklessness with which many, “who profess and call themselves Christians,” are running the giddy round of self-delusion and self-dependence—which should bring home the thoughts of men to God and their own hearts; and induce them, in the noise and bustle of this restless age, to commune with themselves, in their own chamber, and be still. Such a book is here furnished—unpretending and artless, yet sagacious, powerful and persuasive—as fearless as the Baptist, yet with the Evangelist’s gentleness and meekness—deep, searching and thorough, yet clear and intelligible to the simplest reader—wearying none with its minuteness or prolixity, offending none with its abruptness or severity, delightful to all for its ease, its perspicuity and its amenity.—Missionary.

It would be far exceeding our limits to expatiate on the character of the age, or to show by an analysis of Mr. Hooker’s work, how skilfully and eloquently he has aimed to arrest its pernicious tendencies. The “Popular Infidelity” as well as the “Portion of the Soul,” is a work eminently adapted to the age; and if we have any fault to find with the author, it is that he does not himself view it in that light; that he writes professedly for a class, instead of challenging attention to the work which he is really accomplishing, of writing for his age, and thus speaking in that loftier tone which the reformer is authorised to assume. Infidelity in its more subtle forms, and such as Mr. Hooker has described, is, we fear, a characteristic of the age: few pens have revealed more clearly than his its philosophy and impiety, and our only regret is, that he has not brought the actors and the actions of the Christian world side by side with the original which he so vividly conceives, and thus given a popular estimate of their deformity.

Again, reminding the reader, that the infidelity of which Mr. Hooker treats is to be found not in the outward ranks of avowed unbelievers, but in the inmost recesses of the hearts of professed Christians, we beg leave earnestly to recommend the work to general perusal. It is written in a pure strain of Christian philosophy, and should find its way to the closets and affections of all those “who profess and call themselves Christians.”—New York Churchman.

In the very first chapter of this work, one finds himself introduced into a new and delightful field. To most readers new emotions and unaccustomed trains of thought spring up in the mind, awakening and enkindling the desire for deeper and fuller insight into the great truths there brought to view; and as one proceeds ideas continually cluster around the mind with all the interest and freshness which novelty and a deep insight into our nature can give them. But here let it not be forgotten, that an imperious call is made upon our own undivided attention. If we expect to enter into the spirit of the book, and fully to grasp the author’s argument in all its relations and bearings, we must make up our minds to more of an intellectual effort than is required in the perusal of most books which issue from the press. There is an originality in the conception of “Popular Infidelity,” an intellectual superiority in the execution to which few books of the present day can lay claim.

On the whole we think the treatise on Popular Infidelity one of the best practical works that has appeared for some time; and we would confidently recommend it to the attention of all who wish to become intimately acquainted with their own character. It is eminently calculated to promote the cause of deep, genuine, and enlightened piety, and will suffer nothing, to say the very least, in a comparison with the popular and useful works of Phillip. We have seldom seen a work which so accurately analyses the feelings and principles of the human heart, lays bare the secret springs of human action, and presents to view one’s real self.—Episcopal Recorder.

Popular Infidelity.—This is the fifth volume of the Library of Christian Knowledge, and a volume on a subject which claims all the attention the author has given to it. It is a prominent part of the merit of his work that he gives a clear diagnosis, an intelligible description of the disease for which religion is a cure. The disease is self-deception in various forms and of various types.

Some of the author’s phraseology relating to doctrines seems to imply belief in certain points concerning which we should differ from him. But his views of human ability, of the use of reason in relation to religion and of spiritual influences, appear to us to be sound and scriptural. Without being able to go into a particular description of the work, we judge from what examination we have made, that it may be safely read, in general for doctrine, and every where for reproof and correction, by Christians of all sects.—Boston Christian Register.

Popular Infidelity. By the Rev. Herman Hooker, M. A.—This work supplies a desideratum. Popular Infidelity, of which it treats, has been too long permitted to extend its influence, without any direct opposition from the religious press. Those who could, have refrained from defending “the faith once delivered to the Saints;” and Heresy has been permitted to stalk abroad triumphantly, where the principles and doctrines of the Scriptures should have taken precedence. Every Christian—every clergyman at least, who would defend his belief—should fortify himself with this unanswerable volume. —Philadelphia Gazette, Aug. 8, 1836.

Popular Infidelity. By the Rev. Herman Hooker, M. A.—This is the fifth volume of the Library of Christian Knowledge, and is an original work of the accomplished editor of that valuable series. All classes of Christians may find food for reflection in the very important considerations suggested by the author. The work is not, as might be supposed, a defence of the outworks of Christianity against the scepticism of the professed Infidel. But it is a most able and eloquent attack upon the practical infidelity of professed believers. Every kind and degree of unbelief are powerfully assailed. The secret enemies of faith are dragged from their lurking places, stripped of their disguise, and held up to the light in their naked deformities. The extensive reading of this work cannot but promote the cause of religion in the community.—National Gazette, Aug. 6, 1836.

Popular Infidelity. By the Rev. Herman Hooker, belongs to a class of works which are seldom read as extensively as they deserve. Its purpose is to show to what extent a practical disbelief in Christianity exists even among those, who living in a Christian community, and committing no violation of its external ordinances, believe and call themselves Christians. That this adherence to the form, without retaining the substance, is too common among all classes, is a truth which even superficial observation will render manifest, but which Mr. H. illustrates by many well chosen examples. We wish his essay a circulation corresponding to its merits.—Commercial Herald, Aug. 9, 1836.

Popular Infidelity. By the Rev. Herman Hooker, M. A.—We have read this book with no ordinary interest. The subject on which it treats is of vital importance to every class of readers. We have several valuable works upon this subject, but none, that we know of, which occupies the ground taken by our author.

He has descended into the dark arcana of the human soul, and following the intricate winding of the unbelief through all its hidden and unseen influences, has exposed the fallacy of that popular sentimentalism which often passes for religion, and shown the contrariety which exists between the professed opinions and conduct of men, to be owing to the latent infidelity of the heart.

It will be difficult to find a book, that so drives us into the contemplation of ourselves; that so accurately analyzes the thoughts and feelings of men, and so vividly exhibits the self-flattery, by which we cheat ourselves into the belief, that we reverence and admire the character of God, when all we admire and reverence, is but the image of ourselves, which we have contrived to ascribe to him.

In a word, it is rich in the most difficult of all knowledge, the knowledge of ourselves. It is full of thought; thought that often surprises, not only by originality of conception, but by the striking and beautiful contrast in which it is presented.

Few persons, we imagine, can read any one chapter of this book, and not wish to read the whole. The style is colloquial, nervous, and animated; the language, in a high degree, Saxon.

The author is peculiarly happy in his citations from the Scriptures. The passages cited, not only illustrate and enforce the sentiments he advances, but the manner of their introduction illustrates and enforces them; so that they are seen to possess a charm, and an extension of application, which the reader had before failed to observe.

We have seldom read a book in which so little could be anticipated. As the reader turns from page to page, he finds his curiosity continually excited by new and unexpected thoughts, presented under a rich variety of beautiful and striking illustration. When he supposes himself at the end of the subject, it comes up in a new light, and new fields of contemplation open before him.—N. Y. Evangelist.

THE
LIBRARY
OF
Christian Knowledge.

EDITED BY

THE REV. HERMAN HOOKER, M. A.,

AUTHOR OF THE “PORTION OF THE SOUL,” &C.

VOL. VI.

LABORE RELUCENS.

PHILADELPHIA:

WILLIAM MARSHALL AND COMPANY;

MDCCCXXXVII.

SKETCH

OF THE

REFORMATION IN ENGLAND.

BY THE REV. J. J. BLUNT,

FELLOW OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

With an Introductory Letter,

TO THE EDITOR,

BY GEORGE WASHINGTON DOANE, D. D.,

BISHOP OF NEW JERSEY.

PAUL’S CROSS.

PHILADELPHIA:

WILLIAM MARSHALL & CO.

1837.

“They that goe downe to the sea in ships, and occupie by the great waters, they see the workes of the Lord, and his wonders in the deepe. For God is marvellous in the surges and tempests of the sea: he is marvellous in the firmament of heaven: but much more marvellous is he in the surges and stormy tempests of his church. Heere may we behold the worke of his hands. This is the shop of his power, of his wisedome, of his light, and truth, and righteousnesse, and patience, and mercy. Heere may we see the children of light, and the children of darknesse: the vessels of honor, and the vessels of shame: the assaults of falshood, and the glorie and victorie of truth. Heere shall we see how God leadeth even into hell, and yet bringeth safely backe: how he killeth, and yet reviveth: how he refuseth the full, and feedeth the hungrie: how he is the ruine of many, and the resurrection of many. Heere may we see the wonderfull waies, and the unsearcheable judgements of God.”

Bishop Jewel, Sermon on Josh. vi. 1.

Philadelphia:
T. K. & P. G. Collins, Printers,
No. 1 Lodge Alley.

PREFACE.

The Reformation is one of the most remarkable events in our history, whether considered in relation to politics or religion; for its influence was most powerful upon both. My own reading, profession, and taste have led me to regard it in the latter rather than in the former light; and therefore, brief as the following sketch is, it will not be found of the nature of an abridgment of larger histories of the Reformation which have contemplated it in all its many bearings, but a continuous, though succinct account, of its rise, progress, and consummation, chiefly considered as a great Revolution of the Church. I have avoided, as far as I could, taking my materials at second hand. I have been governed in my choice of them by a desire to seize upon such as, being characteristic in kind, might not be oppressive in number; and I have worked them up into a whole, with less regard to the line and rule by which others may have wrought already, than to the positions into which they seemed of themselves to fall most naturally. If in my treatment of the many delicate and difficult questions which such a subject stirs, I have former writers with me, it is well. I have not, however, constrained myself to seek out their path and pursue it, though I am too conscious of my own deficiencies, and of the extreme uncertainty of history, to be otherwise than pleased, if I happen to strike into it unawares. If on the same occasions, I have the good fortune to agree with the voice of my own times, it is well too: it is folly to be singular, except for the purpose of being right; but still I have not hearkened out for that voice, and studiously walked by it. I have gone as my facts directed me, taking them as I found them, unpacked. For those facts I have generally given my authorities, that my readers may judge for themselves of the credit due to them; and for the speculations which accompany them, whether doctrinal or practical, I may say that they are meant to serve the cause of truth and equity, not of party; it is for others to say whether they are reasonable, and to let them prevail only so far as they prove so—valeant quantum valent.

INTRODUCTORY LETTER.

St. Mary’s Parsonage,

Conversion of St. Paul, 1837.

My Dear Brother:

When you proposed to me that I should write an Introduction to Mr. Blunt’s “Sketch of the Reformation in England,” included, at my suggestion, in your “Library of Christian Knowledge,” I saw an admirable opportunity to invite attention to that great crisis of the Christian world; and I consented. As I meditated on the subject, it deepened in interest, and rose in elevation, and increased in magnitude, till it became absorbing and overwhelming. I felt that an Essay on the English Reformation, that should trace it from its true beginnings, contemplate all its bearings, and carry out its just conclusions, was a work to fill a volume, and to take up years. Is not the “Sketch” itself—I was thus brought to think—which Mr. Blunt has drawn, the very thing best suited to the present purpose? In its design, a bird’s-eye view of that illustrious passage in the history of man; in its execution, rapid, vigorous, picturesque; the manliest conceptions in the raciest words; so intensely interesting that he who takes it up will never lay it down unread, nor read it without the strongest impulse to read more—surely, this is the very result to which I proposed to address myself; and to attract attention to the study of the English Reformation, and to make men in love with its ennobling themes, and to imbue their minds with its instructive lessons, and to possess their hearts with its inspiring influences, and to inflame them with its martyr spirit, the book itself shall be its own best introduction.

Were I to designate, dear Hooker, the branch of study which has fallen into the most unreasonable neglect, and which yet would overpay, with most abundant, and with richest fruits, the utmost cost of prosecution, it should be without a doubt, the study of Church History. “It is not St. Augustine’s nor St. Ambrose’s works,” Lord Bacon well remarks,[1] “that will make so wise a divine”—he might as well have said, so wise a man—“as ecclesiastical history, thoroughly read and observed.” “There is, in good truth,”—we justify, while we illustrate, the words of the great Philosopher, by the language of one who is himself their living illustration, the present Principal of King’s College, London,[2] “there is, in good truth, no way so certain to lead us to truth, no way so certain to lead us to fixed, calm, and Christian views in divinity as the study of it, by the way of history. If we take up a ‘system of divinity,’ whether in the shape of a body of Articles, or a regular treatise, comprising a discussion of all the great points of the Christian covenant, useful and necessary as such things are, each in its own way, yet it cannot be but that they present all these great points to us in a controversial view and with a controversial air. This surely cannot be desirable. Our concern with the great doctrines of the Gospel covenant is to govern our hearts, lives, thoughts and words by them, to bring the whole man into subjection to those awful truths which God himself revealed to us in order to teach us how we are to live here, and how to live with him hereafter.” Now it is precisely these “fixed, calm, and Christian views in divinity” which, in this age, and especially in this country, are most wanted—which are sought for in vain in the din of religious controversy and the stir of religious excitement—and for the want of which, to the joy of the infidel, and to the shame and grief of the meek searcher after truth, who would walk humbly with his God, Christianity, at times, appears almost unchristianised. And the inquiries which would lead men to them—which securing to us, upon the certain warrant of “Holy Scripture and ancient authors,” a sound rule of faith, should establish for us a sober standard of feeling in matters of practical religion, and as it were, domesticate among us that serene and dovelike Christianity, which the sweetest spirit of our age[3] illustrates well, when he speaks of the “soothing tendency” of the Prayer-book—am I not right when I say, that, as Christians, not only, but as patriots and philosophers, there are no investigations more worthy of us—and do I greatly err in the belief, that already, among the thoughtful and the good, there is a preparation to receive them favourably, and to bestow on those who lead the way that best reward and most distinguished honour, their confidence and acquiescence?

Chiefly, however, to two portions of the ever-flowing stream of history would I, if the permission were but given me, direct the public mind—the history of the Church in the first ages, and the history of the English Reformation. The Church of the first ages were God’s “eye witnesses and ministers of the word.” It is a maxim of the courts, “expositio contemporanea est fortissima.” The first reception is the best. As we owe the integrity of the text to them, so are we their debtors for the certainty of the interpretation. “The contradiction of tongues,” saith Lord Bacon,[4] “doth every where meet us, out of the tabernacle of God; therefore, whithersoever thou shalt turn thyself, thou shalt find no end of controversies except thou withdraw thyself into that tabernacle.” “The fathers of the Church,” says Townsend,[5] “are unanimous on all those points which peculiarly characterise true Christianity. They assert the divinity, the incarnation, and the atonement of Christ; and thus bear their decisive testimony against the modern reasoners on these points. They are unanimous in asserting that the primitive Churches were governed by an order of men, who possessed authority over others who had been set apart for preaching and administering the Sacraments: and certain privileges and powers were committed to that higher order which were withheld from the second and third. The reception of the canon of Scripture, the proofs of its authenticity and genuineness, rest upon the authority of the fathers; and there are customs of universal observance, which are not in express terms commanded in Scripture, and which rest upon the same foundation. We are justified, therefore, on these and on many other accounts, in maintaining the utmost veneration for their unanimous authority, which has never in any one instance clashed with Scripture, which will preserve in its purity every Church which is directed by them, and check or extinguish every innovation which encourages error in doctrine, or licentiousness in discipline.” “He that hath willingly subscribed to the word of God,” says Bishop Hall,[6] attested in the everlasting Scriptures; to all the primitive creeds; to the four general councils; to the common judgment of the fathers, for six hundred years after Christ, (which we, of our reformation, religiously profess to do;) this man may possibly err in trifles, but he cannot be an heretic.” This is the doctrine of common sense not less than of the Church. It was the departure from it which constituted the necessity of the English Reformation. It is the departure from it which constitutes the danger of our day. It is in the return to it, in standing in the ways, and asking for “the old paths,” that our safety and our hope are to be found. It is a blessed omen for our times, that, through the zealous devotion of Pusey and Keble and Newman, the ancient documents will soon be brought, in their translations of the Fathers, within the common reach.

Of kindred interest, and of scarcely inferior importance, is the study of the English Reformation. For a time, the Church, drunk with too much prosperity, had wandered and grown wanton. For a time, God left her to eat of the fruit of her own ways, and be filled with her own devices. But,

“His own possession and his lot

He will not quite forsake.”

The wrath of man he makes to praise him. The remainder of it he restrains. When the time came that he would have mercy upon Sion, men were not wanting to the work, with holy hearts, and giant hands, and tongues of fire. They took their stand upon the pure word of God. They appealed to the consenting voice of all Christian antiquity. They toiled. They prayed. They bled. They burned. They persevered. They triumphed. The Church, deformed before, was now reformed. She returned to her old principles, and to her “first love.” “We look,” says Joseph Mede,[7] “after the form, rites, and discipline of antiquity; and endeavour to bring our own as near as we can to that pattern.” “If I mistake not greatly,” says Casaubon, writing to Salmasius,[8] “the soundest part of all the reformation is in England; for there, with the study of the scripture, there is the most regard to the study of antiquity.”

But I must check myself. I may not enter now upon this rich and tempting field. The time would fail me to tell of Wickliff, and Cranmer, and Ridley, and Latimer, and Taylor, and Rogers, and the glorious host of witnesses for God, that “loved not their life unto the death.”

“Methinks that I could trip o’er heaviest soil

Light as a buoyant bark from wave to wave,

Were mine the trusty staff that Jewel gave

To youthful Hooker in familiar style

The gift exalting, and with playful smile.[9]

For thus equipped, and bearing on his head

The donor’s farewell blessing, can he dread

Tempest, or length of way, or weight of toil?

More sweet than odours caught by him who sails

Near spicy shores of Araby the blest;

A thousand times more exquisitely sweet

The freight of holy feeling which we meet

In thoughtful moments, wafted by the gales

From fields where good men walk, or bowers wherein they rest.

Holy and heavenly spirits as they are

Spotless in life, and eloquent as wise,

With what entire affection do they prize

Their new-born[10] Church! Labouring with earnest care

To baffle all that may her strength impair;

That Church—the unperverted Gospel’s seat;

In their afflictions a divine retreat;

Source of their liveliest hope, and tenderest prayer!

The truth exploring with an equal mind,

In doctrine and communion they have sought

Firmly between the two extremes to steer;

But theirs the wise man’s ordinary lot,

To trace right courses for the stubborn blind,

And prophesy to ears that will not hear.—

Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sketches.

Let us hope that to this most fruitful field of truth, and purity and piety, and charity, Mr. Blunt’s delightful “Sketch” may turn many an eager eye and many a vigorous foot. And for ourselves, dear brother, when the cares and disappointments and disquietudes of life disturb or weary us, and we are tempted to fall back, or turn aside, or falter, on the high, “right onward” course of duty, next to the Author of our faith, and the bright cloud of prophets and apostles who stand nearest to his throne, let us direct our eyes to the illustrious fathers of the English Reformation. “We shall find there,” I cite again the eloquent and admirable Rose,[11] “bright examples of saints and martyrs—of men of whom the world was not worthy—who have done all and suffered all, that men could do and could suffer, for that one blessed cause, and in so doing and so suffering have found an elevation, a peace and a joy which nothing could give but the sense of God’s presence, and the influence of God’s Spirit, blessing his own servants in doing his own work. So warned, and so cheered, by the voice of Scripture and the comment of history, we shall betake us each to our humble path with a clearer conviction of duty, a stronger sense of the danger and the guilt of neglecting it, a firmer hope of a blessing, a more cheerful and animating view of the prospect before us.”

And now, dear brother,—who rejoicest in a name, than which the earth has never known a nobler, the name of “the judicious Hooker,”—in the hope that, for the love you bear me, you will pardon this strange rambling, and with the prayer, that God may bless you many years with health and strength, to serve his glorious Church, with the rich gifts which he has given you—or, failing these, may comfort and sustain your heart with Milton’s noble sentiment,

“They also serve who only stand and wait,”—

believe me, with sincere affection, your faithful friend and brother in the Church and Gospel of our common Lord.

G. W. Doane.

The Rev. Herman Hooker,

Editor of the Library of Christian Knowledge.

CONTENTS.

A SKETCH
OF THE
REFORMATION IN ENGLAND.

CHAPTER I.

BRITISH AND ANGLO-SAXON CHURCHES.—INTERCOURSE WITH ROME.—EARLY CORRUPTIONS.

The Reformation is not to be regarded as a great and sudden event which took the nation by surprise. It was merely the crisis to which things had been tending for some centuries; and if the fire did at last run over the country with wonderful rapidity, it was because the trees were all dry. It is a mistake to suppose that whilst the Roman catholic religion prevailed all was unity. True it is, that the elements of discontent were as yet working for the most part under ground, but they were not on that account the less likely to make themselves eventually felt. The strong man armed was keeping the house, and therefore his goods were at peace; but he was in jeopardy long before he was spoiled. Luther was the match that produced the explosion, but the train had been laid by the events of generations before him.

It may not then be the least useful, nor, perhaps, the least interesting portion of a History of the Reformation in England, to trace some of the causes that led to it; some of the incidents that made it practicable, and some of the abuses that rendered it necessary. And here there is no need to conceal the obligations we were under in the first instance to the church of Rome. Neither Gregory himself, nor Augustin his messenger, appears to have been influenced by any other than a truly Christian spirit in seeking the conversion of England, then no very tempting prize; and though there can be no doubt that Christianity had been introduced into this island much earlier, whether by any of the apostles themselves; whether after the persecution on the death of Stephen, by some of the Syrian Christians, “who were scattered abroad, and went every where preaching the word;”[12] or whether by devout soldiers of the same nation, whom the famine foretold by Agabus might have driven into the armies of Claudius, and who might have come with him into Britain;[13] or whether by some of the Jewish converts dispersed over the world, when that same emperor “commanded all Jews to depart from Rome;”[14]—whether from these or from other sources unknown to us, England was in some degree Christianised, the existence of a British church before the arrival of Augustin in the year 597 is a fact clearly established. Its independent origin is sufficiently attested by the subjects of controversy between the Anglo-Roman and British Christians; the time of Easter, in which the Britons followed, as they said, St. John and the eastern Christians, a point of heterodoxy, it may be observed, in which the Irish also concurred,[15] who in some other respects accorded with the British church, building their places of worship, for instance, with wood, and thatching them with reeds;[16] the tonsure, whether it should be that of Peter or Paul, or none whatever;[17] the rite of Baptism, with regard to which, however, the nature of the difference between the churches does not appear, though a difference there was,[18] and the same may be said of the celibacy of the clergy. The Britons had churches of their own; built after a fashion of their own; their own saints; their own hierarchy,—the British bishops attending a council as such; and holding no intercourse with the Angles even in Bede’s time, but looking on them as Samaritans.[19] Moreover, the jealousy with which the Welsh long afterwards regarded all ecclesiastical interference on the part of England, their resolute assertion of their right to a metropolitan of their own at St. Davids, and their actual exercise of that right till the time of Henry I, argues the same difference in the rock from which the English and British churches were originally hewn.[20] Let, however, tribute be paid to whom tribute is due: Augustin was the founder of the English church as distinguished from the British, for the Britons made a conscience of leaving the Pagan invaders to die in their ignorance and their sins: and it is probable that both in doctrine and discipline the religion of this country owed to the great Apostle of England (as he has been called) its revival, extension, and permanent establishment. But Gregory was no pope in the more modern sense of the word; it was his desire that the church of Rome should be followed by the church of England when there was reason for it, not otherwise; he would have some errors reproved; some he would have tolerated; some he would not have seen, that all might be done away; ecclesiastical property he would have recovered where it had been plundered; but that more should be exacted than had been taken away, or that a merchandise should be made of the loss, that was to be far from the church.[21] No wonder that the Gospel, mixed though it certainly was even then with some alloy, should have made its way in England, recommended by a spirit like this, and that kings should have been found its nursing fathers;[22] accordingly they erected crosses; built and endowed churches and monasteries, and the fierce superstitions of the Saxons made way for the religion of Jesus. But the mystery of iniquity had begun to work even in Bede’s time.[23] His portrait of Aidanus or Madoc, a missionary from Ikolmkill to the Angles near a century before, is clearly meant to contrast with the ecclesiastics of his own day. He might have been the prototype of Chaucer’s “poore parson of a towne.” He was chaste; he lived as he taught others to live; he travelled through the villages teaching the word, not on horseback, but on foot. Those whom he met, if believers, he confirmed in the faith; if unbelievers, he initiated in it; unlike the idlers of these times (says Bede), all who were in his company, whether priests or people, were busied in reading the Scriptures, or learning the Psalms by rote. There was a stirring amongst the dry bones through his exertions; the people flocked to hear the word of God; churches were built in many places, and monasteries were enriched by the bounty of the king. Such is the picture drawn by Bede, coloured perhaps somewhat too highly; for it seems unlikely that such effects, to their full extent, should have been produced by a teacher who spoke the language of his hearers but imperfectly, and had occasional need of an interpreter.[24] Much, however, might have been done, in a popular cause, even in spite of such an obstacle. Giraldus tells us that when he preached the crusades to the Welshmen at Haverford West, he could gain 200 recruits at a sermon in French or Latin, of which the people did not understand one word, though they knew and approved its object.[25] Still in a sketch which Bede gives us of the state of a convent (consisting as was not uncommon both of monks and nuns), at a period not much later than Madoc, there is a sad falling off. The case is indeed spoken of as a flagrant one, and the facts are to be gathered out of a fabulous story of a warning sent by an angel to a monk of that house; signifying that a judgment was coming upon it; for that of its inmates none (save one only) were occupied with the good of their souls; all were asleep, or only awake to sin, both men and women; the cells intended for study and prayer had been converted into chambers of revelry and excess; the virgins who had dedicated themselves to God, having no respect unto their vows, employed all their leisure hours in adorning their persons, as though they were brides, or wished to be.[26] Indeed, on one occasion about the same time, when a panic prevailed through the country by reason of the plague, it was actually attempted in one quarter of the island where Christianity had been received, to repair the temples and restore idolatry.[27] Whatever, therefore, the wheat might be that had been sown by Augustin and his companions, the tares, it seems, were growing about it apace, and were ready to choke it. The truth, however, appears to be, that as yet there was no well-organised church in England. There was wanted a system in matters ecclesiastical, what was done was done chiefly by good and zealous individuals. Rome might have supplied the defect; but the relation in which England stood to Rome is not easily determined from the history of Bede; it was probably ill defined, fluctuating, and uncertain, depending in a great measure upon the accident of the day. Pope Gregory is indeed represented as speaking with some authority in the answers which he returns to Augustin, who consults him on the regulations of the infant church;—he may furnish him with sacred vessels, ornaments, robes, relics, books, and give him power to consecrate Bishops in Britain, and directions for using it. Reference may be made to the pope from time to time, in any crisis of difficulty, or doubt, or hardship; wholesome decrees with regard to the method of filling up the sees in case of death may be received from him; his influence may be asked to protect the liberties of a religious house; but distance and the turbulence of the times rendered the intercourse difficult, and subjected it to much interruption. Rome was in those days pestilential;[28] the Alps were formidable, often fatal to travellers; the seas were full of danger in the actual state of navigation; it was a weary way from Calais to Marseilles (one of the usual routes), and if the political aspect of things rendered a mayor of the palace suspicious, it might be worse than a weary way;—a journey to Rome for the sake of gaining religious knowledge was reckoned in the middle of the seventh century a labour of uncommon merit.[29] The church of England, therefore, was left a while pretty much to itself; and though great good came of this, it was not without its mixture of evil. On the one hand, the liberties of the rising church were fostered by this non-intercourse with Rome; it threw the nation very much upon its own resources, and gave to the king, and above all, to synods of the clergy, an authority in ecclesiastical affairs, to which they might not otherwise have attained. Perhaps, too, it cultivated a better understanding between the princes and prelates, who seem to have gone hand in in hand these early times; the former inviting, welcoming, and establishing, by grants of land for ever, the residence of these Christian pastors amongst their own people—a measure of which they might not have thought the advantages so obvious, had they thereby subjected themselves and their conduct to the perpetual animadversion of a third party at Rome; for it is curious to observe that, within 200 years after the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon church, Aldfrid, a king of Northumbria, feels himself called upon to resist the interference of the pope in a case of appeal, and actually refuses to listen to his recommendation. On the other hand, a want of combination and co-operation (a defect so injurious to every great undertaking, and not the least so to the successful preaching of the word of God,) made itself sensibly felt in the religious establishment of England. Canons seem to have been published, but not to have been rigidly observed. The order of episcopal succession appears to have proceeded upon no very settled or intelligible plan; not that it was vitiated by any incompetency of the parties to administer the rite; but that the exercise of the episcopal office was desultory—a synod, or an individual, or a king soliciting it, a native bishop, or a foreigner, as it might happen, conferring it;—so that, shortly before Bede’s time,[30] there was only one canonical bishop throughout all England. All this worked confusion in the church; it impaired its efficiency; it gave the ancient prejudices of Paganism, and other causes of corruption, time to rally, and to debase the Gospel, if they could not destroy it. Accordingly Oswi, king of Northumbria, and Ecbert, king of Kent, thought it high time to bestir themselves. They consulted together on the actual condition of the church, and came to a determination, in which the church itself concurred, to send a priest of their common choosing to Rome, to be there consecrated archbishop of Canterbury, who might thenceforth supply the sees of England canonically, and set in order its ecclesiastical rites. The office, however, of reforming the Anglo-Saxon church was not destined to the man of their choice—he, and all his, died, probably of the malaria; and Theodore, a monk “of Tarsus, a city of Cilicia,” was finally fixed upon by the pope, consecrated archbishop of Canterbury, and despatched to England. He seems to have been one of those persons whose spirit and talents give a character to the times in which they live. He made a visitation of all England, correcting abuses, establishing discipline, ordaining bishops, re-ordaining those whose commission was irregular, introducing music generally into the churches, the use of it having been as yet confined to Kent, and encouraging the study of Greek and Latin, of which the effects were felt in the days of Bede. Thus did he reduce to order a very disorderly state of things; and, in spite of the various independent kingdoms into which the island was divided, and by which misrule had been perpetuated, was an archbishop (and he was the first) to whom the universal church of England submitted.[31] That he might consolidate his acts, and render the unity of his church lasting, he convoked a synod of the bishops and clergy at Heorutford (Hereford[32]) about the year 673, and proposed for their adoption several canons, which, as they throw considerable light on the state of ecclesiastical affairs at that period, are here inserted:—1. That all persons should keep Easter in common, on the Sunday after the full moon after the vernal equinox. 2. That no bishop should interfere with the diocese of another, but be content with governing his own. 3. That no bishop should be at liberty to disturb a religious house in any way, nor to take from it any portion of its property by force. 4. That monks should not migrate from one monastery to another without the certificate of their own abbot, but should continue under the rule to which they at first professed obedience. 5. That the clergy should not withdraw themselves from their own proper bishop to wander about at large; nor should be received elsewhere unless provided with letters commendatory from that bishop, under pain of excommunication. 6. That bishops and clergy, who are strangers, should be treated hospitably, and be therewith content abstaining from the exercise of their office, unless permitted by the bishop of the diocese, in which they are staying to do otherwise. 7. That a synod should be held twice a year; on which, however, an amendment was moved and carried, that it should be once a year only, and on the first of August. 8. That the bishops should take precedence according to the priority of their consecration. 9. That the number of bishops, in consideration of the multitudes added to the church, should be augmented: and, lastly, that license should be allowed to no man to contract an unlawful or incestuous marriage; that no man should put away his wife, but as the Gospel permits—for the cause of fornication; and that whoso should put away his wife should never be joined to another, if he would not forfeit the name of Christian; but either remain single or be reconciled to the same. From these provisions it may be conjectured what were the prevailing defects of the church establishment in the seventh century; and it is not difficult to see in them, though as yet undeveloped, several of the evils which were destined to call for a reformation eight centuries later. On the whole, the Anglo-Saxon church was now more perfectly modelled upon the Roman than it had yet been; and, accordingly, some years afterwards, a certain king of the Picts, Naiton by name, sent to England for instructions on church architecture, and the right observance of Easter, having heard (as he said) that the English had conformed to the example of the holy apostolical church of Rome.[33] As years roll on the intercourse between this country and Italy increases[34];—a pilgrimage to Rome, which, in the middle of the seventh century, was unusual[35], at the close of it was common enough. Thus Ceadwalla, king of the West Saxons, abdicated, and repaired to Rome for baptism; took the name of Peter; died, and was buried in the church of that apostle. His successor, Ine, commending, in like manner, his kingdom to the care of younger men, after a reign of thirty-seven years, repaired to the threshold of the blessed apostles, desiring to sojourn for a season upon that holy ground whilst on earth, that he might thereby secure to himself a more friendly reception among the saints in heaven. Cœnred, king of the Mercians, and Offa, heir-apparent of the kingdom of the East Saxons, pursued the same course; which, indeed, was now adopted both by noble and ignoble priests and people, men and women, with the utmost emulation.[36]

Rome, however, had by this time, corrupted the simplicity of the faith, as it was taught there by St. Paul in his own hired house; and whilst, no doubt, the English pilgrims who returned brought away with them much to civilise and something to edify, they brought away with them, too, much to corrupt the church at home. For Rome was under a temptation to mingle sacred and profane together; it did not, like Constantinople, rise at once a Christian capital. The Gospel was introduced into it, and had to win its way by slow degrees through the ancient sympathies and inveterate habits of the Pagan city. It was a maxim with some of the early promoters of the Christian cause to do as little violence as possible to existing prejudices. They would run the risk of Barnabas being confounded with Jupiter, and Paul with Mercurius. In the transition from Pagan to Papal Rome much of the old material was worked up. The heathen temples became Christian churches; the altars of the gods, altars of the saints; the curtains, incense, tapers, votive tablets, remained the same; the aquaminarium was still the vessel for holy water; St. Peter stood at the gate instead of Cardea; St. Rocque or St. Sebastian in the bed-room, instead of the “Phrygian Penates;” St. Nicholas was the sign of the vessel, instead of Castor and Pollux; the Mater Deûm became the Madonna; alms pro Matre Deûm became alms for the Madonna; the festival of the Mater Deûm, the festival of the Madonna, or Lady Day; the Hostia, or victim, was now the host; the “Lugentes Campi,” or dismal regions, Purgatory;[37] the offerings to the Manes were masses for the dead. The parallel might be drawn out to a far greater extent; indeed, so much of the Roman had been grafted upon the Roman catholic system during the dark ages (as they are called) that the confusion of ideas and of terms resulting from it forms quite a feature in the writings of the Italian authors who lived at the revival of letters. Images, holy and unholy, are by them crowded together without the smallest regard to decency, though evidently without any intention to offend against it in the parties themselves. Such was the process of deterioration which the Gospel was undergoing at Rome (progressive because profitable) at the time when our Anglo-Saxon ancestors were improving their acquaintance with that city by repairing to it for purposes of devotion.

What were the doctrines and practices which at present prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon church, and how far it was exempt from the errors of later times, it is not easy to determine; more especially as the ecclesiastical history of Bede, and the early Saxon homilies and canons, quoted by his commentators, would often lead us to conflicting conclusions:—

I. With regard to the doctrine of transubstantiation, we read in Bede of the “bread of life,” “the holy bread;”[38] of a man dying without the “viaticum salutis;”[39] of another, inquiring, when at the point of death, of his attendant in a monastery, whether they had the “eucharist in the house?”[40] and though, on one occasion, the mass is spoken of as a sacrifice (mysterii immolatio)[41], yet it may be contended that the term is Gregory’s own (for it occurs in the answer returned by him to Augustin’s queries), and that it cannot be fairly ascribed to the venerable historian himself. Meanwhile a canon, said to be of the age of archbishop Theodore, (and if so, more ancient than the history, and though written in Latin, accompanied by a Saxon translation, which, at any rate, pleads some antiquity in its favour,) argues the body of Christ to be present in the elements, not substantially, but spiritually; adding, that this mode is recognised by St. Paul, who speaks of the Israelites as “eating all of the same spiritual meat, and drinking of that spiritual rock which followed them, and that rock was Christ.”[42]

II. On the subject of image worship, the Anglo-Saxon church does not seem to have been altogether blameless. In the preface to the Laws of Alfred, though the other commandments are enumerated in their order, the second is omitted, only there is added after the rest.—“Thou shalt not make gods of silver or gold.” There must have been a reason for such a change in the positive terms and relative position of this law; and it is difficult to assign any reason but one.[43]

III. Purgatory was a part of the Anglo-Saxon creed. This, indeed, was established on authority. Drithelme, a famous saint (as he proved) of Northumbria, died and was buried; but he was born to refute the apophthegm that dead men tell no tales, for he returned to life, and gave an account of his travels.[44] He had been conducted by an angel in white raiment towards the sunrising to a valley of vast depth and interminable extent; the one side of it glowing with fire, the other pelted by fierce and incessant storms of snow and hail. Between these two conflicting elements he beheld the souls of miserable mortals bandied to and fro, anxious to escape from the intolerable anguish of the moment, and thus perpetually leaping from side to side in this unhappy valley. Such was Purgatory. But though Drithelme made these matters known to one Hæmgils, an Irishman, and through Hæmgils they were communicated to Bede, the doctrine does not appear to have been universally held in the Saxon church, or, at least, to have held a very prominent place in its articles of faith. Certain it is, that in some Anglo-Saxon sermons and confessions yet extant, no mention is made of it, where mention of it might be expected.[45] Still, the doctrine was clearly abroad; and in the form it had assumed the Platonic purgatory was improved upon, and the poets, from Cædmon[46] downwards, availed themselves of these fearful images, conjured up by the morbid imagination of the early monks, and consigned, in their turn,

——“the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice.”[47]

IV. Purgatory, of course, brought other doctrines in its train—penance for the living, that they might never come into it;[48] confession, that penance might be enjoined and adjusted;[49] masses for the dead, that they might be delivered from it.[50] These acts were not, perhaps, for a while, considered obligatory. The abuses of the Roman catholic church did not come of observation, but crept into the world by stealth, till, having at length established themselves de facto, they were confirmed by the decrees of some general council, and thenceforth became de jure a part and parcel of the catholic creed. Thus the use of images by degrees prevailed, till it was eventually authorised by a decree of a council at Nice in the year 787. The doctrine of transubstantiation gained a footing in credulous times, and was encouraged from interested motives, (for who should set bounds to the authority of a priest who had power to produce the Deity himself at his bidding?)[51] till it was pronounced orthodox at the council of Placentia in 1095. The communion, in one kind only, had become customary (from whatever cause,) and the practice received the placet of the church in 1415, at the council of Constance.

V. The Virgin appears to have been held in great, perhaps in idolatrous, honour by the Anglo-Saxon church. It is true that—

The cross preceding Him who floats in air,

The pictured Saviour!

was to be seen in the processions of Augustin, and not the Virgin;[52] and in general her name but seldom occurs in the Ecclesiastical History of Bede; still even here some shadow of the glories that were coming upon her advance to meet us. Eadbald the son of Ethelbert, Augustin’s friend, is said to have founded a church after his extraordinary conversion (for he had not in early life walked in the ways of his father) to “the Holy Mother of God;”[53] and Bishop Wilfrid is declared by an angel (so the legend runs) to have been delivered from death by our Lord, at the prayers and tears of the Bishop’s disciples and brethren, and “the intercession of his own blessed virgin-mother Mary.”[54]

VI. But, indeed, the office of intercession was not confined to the Virgin.[55] The Saxon saints were powerful both in heaven and earth; nothing was too great or too mean for their interference. They could recover a man from the brink of the grave, or cure a horse of the colic.[56] They could clear an island of evil spirits, though it had been over-run with them like a warren; and fill it with springs of water though it had been dry and desolate.[57] They could mend a fractured skull, and tell whether the party had been baptised imperfectly, ineffectually, or not at all, by the rate of the recovery.[58] A hair of their heads could cure a wen.[59] They could disperse an abscess on the arm (without recourse to surgery,) though large as a man’s two hands, and though it should have been occasioned by bleeding when the moon was four days’ old, which (it seems) was an act of incredible folly.[60] Nor was this all; they could unfold the secrets of the grave with the utmost minuteness. One could tell of his encounter with the soul of a sinner in the other world, which was flung at him red-hot and burnt his shoulder and cheek, though when relating his adventure, even if it were in the depth of winter, and however light might be his dress, the saint would sweat as if it were the dog-days.[61] Another could speak of a journey, under the safe conduct of a guardian angel to the same mysterious region; of his approach to the brink of the bottomless pit, through an atmosphere of insufferable stench and darkness; of the balls of fire which were shot upwards out of the abyss and fell into it again, scintillating with the spirits of the damned; of the sudden disappearance of his heavenly guide; of his hearing behind him in this joyless solitude the hollow shrieks of dead men’s souls, as they were led to the the pit’s mouth, mixed with the loud and jubilant laughter of the fiends who conducted them; of their plunge into the burning bottomless gulf; of the dolorous moanings and peals of merriment dying away as they went down into the deep together; of the legion of hideous forms which now encompassed him about threatening to seize him with their fiery pincers, but having no power over him to hurt him; of his casting around a wistful eye to see if there were any to help him; and of his discovering in the distance, as it twinkled through the darkness, the light, as it were, of a star; of its rapid approach and gradual development, till the guardian angel again stands confessed before him; the devils retire; and he is rewarded for his alarm by a translation to the harmonious sounds, the Sabean odours, the pure and placid beams of Paradise.[62]

Whilst, however, we gather these exploits of the early saints of our country from the pages of Bede, it is only just to the memory of that veracious and single-hearted writer to observe, that numerous as may be the lying wonders which he relates and believes on the testimony of others of his own actual knowledge he does not pretend to one. But wherefore are they touched upon at all? Simply because they are characteristic of the times whereof they are told: they supply a gauge by which we can measure the degree and the progress of those corruptions from which the Reformation finally delivered us. Monstrous as these legends are, they were the faith of the nation; for if Bede receives them as facts, were his countrymen in general, so much less enlightened than himself, likely to reject them as fictions? Moreover, they are curious as specimens of a vast magazine of materials, which supplied poetry when it revived after the barbarous ages with much of its wild as well as ludicrous imagery. Dante worked them up into his Divina Comedia. His Inferno, especially, is the offspring of an imagination that had dieted with these monkish mysteries; and it may be observed by the way, that even our own Paradise Lost may have felt their influence, and that Milton may be indirectly indebted for many of the dark and terrible features of this hell to early hagiography. Romance, if it did not owe its existence, owed much of its furniture to the same common stock. The poets of romance drew from it, either directly or through the chroniclers, the adventures that suited them. Turpin, a fictitious archbishop, is constantly introduced by them with solemn sneers, as a voucher for the most extravagant feats of their favourites, and thus the dishonest fictions of the priesthood were made eventually to recoil upon their own order, and swell the cry for reformation; for these popular writers, without, perhaps, intending it, or caring much about the matter, did, undoubtedly, lend a helping hand to the great cause by laughing at much that was fairly ridiculous in the doctors and doctrines of their day; happy had they known where to stop, and not to rush upon things truly sacred with the temerity of fools.

But one conservative principle there was in the economy of the Anglo-Saxon church that opposed itself to still further corruption of the faith of Christ, and that was, the free use of the word of God. The Scriptures might not, indeed, be very generally read; Bede complains that they were not; but there was no hinderance thrown in the way of reading them, quite the contrary: he himself gave a translation of the Gospel of St. John; one of the Psalter had appeared already; and in the interval that elapsed before the Norman conquest, other portions of Holy Writ were put forth from time to time in the same vernacular language. Virtue, no doubt, went out of these, narrow as might be the limits within which they circulated; and it is no unusual matter to find in the pages of Bede, and in the midst of the legends, relics, visions, and superstitions, of which they are full, occasional glimpses of better things, and some of the cardinal doctrines of Christianity still struggling vigorously for their lives.[63]

CHAPTER II.

DIVISIONS AMONGST ECCLESIASTICS.—THE REGULAR AND SECULAR CLERGY.—THE POPE FAVOURS THE FORMER.—EXEMPTIONS FROM EPISCOPAL JURISDICTION.—HABITS OF THE FRIARS.

In tracing the progress of corruption in the English church and the causes of it, we have hitherto had a trustworthy guide in the venerable Bede; henceforward, to the time of the Normans, there is much in our history that is dark, intricate, and uncertain.[64] Many early church records have perished in the fires which on different occasions have consumed our cathedrals;—such was the fate of the documents in the cathedral of Canterbury (of all others the most to be desired), which were burnt together with that primitive structure soon after the Norman conquest.[65] A similar loss, and probably one much greater in extent, was sustained through the great fire of London, when St. Paul’s, with its chapter house and the writings contained in it, fell a prey to the flames;[66] not to speak of the wholesale destruction or dispersion of books and papers which accompanied the suppression of the religious houses, and which left to the fell swoop of the puritans but little to do in order to extinguish much of the ancient ecclesiastical annals of England.

However, it was undoubtedly during the interval in question, that a schism arose in the church, which eventually hastened the crisis of the Reformation beyond any one thing else, by dividing the house against itself. The famous Dunstan, who was born in the year 925, was the man to sow the Dragon’s tooth. As yet the different orders of ecclesiastics had lived in harmony. There were secular clergy, and there were regulars; but the latter had not hitherto taken kindly root in England. The great number of churches existing in this kingdom in the middle ages[67] (of which many traces yet remain in a name, where both the building itself and all tradition of it have passed away,) bespeaks the popularity of the secular clergy, for it is not probable that these churches were then served from the monasteries; and, moreover, the lodgement which the seculars effected in the religious houses, as the latter were from time to time evacuated of their inmates by the exterminating sword of the Danes, was the effect as well as the cause of their increasing influence. Accordingly Dunstan found many, if not all, of the monasteries, as well as the cathedrals, in the hands of the canons secular, who resided with their families, performing the daily service, and standing upon much the same footing as such persons now do in our collegiate churches.[68] The saint, however, was not satisfied with the state of disorganization and decay to which the monastic order was reduced—he determined upon its reformation. The Benedictine rule, now become popular throughout Europe, was chosen for his experiment, and the monks were set up against the canons and the clergy. Dunstan was not very scrupulous about the justice of the means he used to accomplish his end; if he could not find a way he could make one. He would enjoin the king (Edgar) for instance, as a penance, to suppress the seculars and introduce the monks into the churches in their stead. It is in vain that synods are held wherein the grievances of the ecclesiastics thus violently ejected are propounded; it is in vain that their sufferings excite the sympathy of the nobles and the monarch who plead for their restoration. “That be far from you,—that be far from you,” were the inexorable words which issued from a crucifix in the council-chamber, for Dunstan had called in the supernatural to his help. A second effort is made in behalf of these deprived ministers. Again the saint commits the decision of his cause to heaven, though less innocently than before. The building where they met is shaken; the floor, at least that part of it which was occupied by the adversaries of Dunstan, sinks from under their feet; and whilst Dunstan and his friends continue to sit in safety, the rest are destroyed or disabled in the ruin. There is much in both these adventures to fasten suspicion upon the saint; for Dunstan, like Cromwell and many more, began his career, in all probability, as a bold and honest zealot, till height begot high thoughts, and he ended with being an ambitious and unflinching adventurer. He was, however, one of the master-spirits of the age. He was, strictly speaking, the founder of the monastic orders in England. They regarded him, whilst living, as their fearless champion, and when dead, as their most powerful intercessor: he gave a triumph to their party which they never forfeited; and having once by his means taken the lead of the secular clergy, they kept it to the Reformation. From amongst the monks of Abingdon, Winchester, and Glastonbury, the three greatest monasteries in England, and from the last more especially, which was Dunstan’s own abbey, were for a long while chosen almost all the abbots, principal ecclesiastical officers, and bishops of England;[69] such was the influence which this extraordinary man had established in his generation; and the natural consequence of so great and so successful an innovation was, a deep-rooted jealousy on the part of the ancient clergy towards the regulars, who had supplanted them, and heart-burnings between both parties, which were injurious alike to religion itself and to the establishment which should have been its support. Traces of this schism, for such it really was, may be discovered both in great matters and small. It spread through the whole church system like a leprosy. The architecture and ornaments of the churches bespoke it. Many of those grotesque figures which are seen to this day decorating the spouts of the roof, or the labels of the windows, were probably meant as a fling at the monks; and satirical caricatures to the same effect may still occasionally be met with on the painted glass of our cathedrals. It gives a complexion to our early literature; and the old chroniclers, being chiefly monks, betray on their side the same besetting sin, often without intending it, and sometimes to their own confusion. Thus we are told by one, that as long as the canons were in possession of the church of Winchester no notice was taken of the remains of St. Swithin, nor had a single miracle been wrought at his grave; but that no sooner were the monks in possession, than they carefully deposited his honoured bones within the cathedral in a case of silver and gold, and miracles ensued abundantly;—premises from which the worthy Thomas Rudborne, himself a monk of Winchester, did not mean that we should infer (what, however, we naturally must) that the canons were the more honest men of the two. Thus, again, the biographer of Ulstan, a bishop of Worcester in the eleventh century, tells us that as the bishop was on a journey to court, to be present at the Christmas festival, he halted for the night at Merlave, where he was hospitably entertained; that he informed his attendants he should on the morrow go to a distant church which he named; that the morning came, and with it a heavy storm of snow and rain; that his clergy made objections to such a journey in such weather; that go, however, the bishop would, even though he should be alone; that they were vexed, indeed, but held their peace; that one Frewen, a man of more audacity and address than the others, volunteered to be the good bishop’s guide; that he acquitted him of his office but scurvily, somewhat as Ariel might have done, taking him by the hand and leading him by a road which proved knee-deep in mud and mire, and wherein the bishop lost a shoe; for it was a plan of the clergy, says William of Malmesbury, who tells this precious story, to make the bishop repent of his resolution and be ruled by his chaplains. Ulstan, it is to be remembered, was a monk, and so was his biographer, and hence this impotent attempt to exalt the order at the expense of the poor seculars.[70] Such adventures are old wives’ tales, it is true; but they are not on that account the less fitted for showing the quarter from which the wind was setting in. On the other hand, the secular clergy, though on many accounts acting at a disadvantage, and certainly as a body less literary than the monks, could occasionally retaliate. We have seen that one of their weapons of warfare was to decorate their churches with monkish figures in burlesque; but their means of molestation were not confined to these inartificial expedients. Langland, for instance, was a secular priest and a satirical poet, and in his vision of Pierce Plowman he lashes the regulars (though chiefly a class of them of whom we have not yet had occasion to speak) without moderation or mercy. Their artifices to procure endowments for their houses, their love of pleasure, their luxury, their horses, hawks, and hounds, are all touched in a spirit sufficiently caustic.[71] It is probable that the nobles in general took a malicious pleasure in encouraging this exposure of a class of men who were their rivals in wealth, and their superiors in intelligence, and thus widened the breach. Chaucer, who was a courtier as well as a poet, no doubt reflects the feelings of the upper ranks of his day, and he cleaves to the seculars. Meanwhile, neither of these ecclesiastical parties seems to have been aware that by their mutual criminations they were preparing the nation to demand a reformation in the manners of them all; and that each was throwing stones at the other, when the houses of both were made of glass.

But their strife was not merely a strife of tongues; it was their pleasure to thwart one another in deed as well as in word. Whenever the monks got footing in the cathedrals (which in many instances they very soon did,) they proved a perpetual thorn in the side of the bishop, more especially if he happened to have been promoted from the secular clergy himself. Then they carried themselves towards him in a spirit of “untamed reluctance.” They would not have this man to reign over them. The bishops were vexed at thus having to encounter foes in their own households, and sometimes we find them expressing an angry but impotent wish, that England was clear of them; and sometimes we find them by a stretch of power expelling the whole fraternity at once, and filling up their places with canons who were ever wont to be faithful and obedient to their diocesan.[72] On one occasion, indeed, this policy is not only put in practice by a bishop of Winchester, but an attempt is made by him to induce all the prelates of England to adopt the same. William the Conqueror (for it was under him that the thing occurred) was nothing loth to listen to the overture of Walkelin (for that was the bishop’s name), and to second this violent measure,[73] probably meaning to lay claim to a lion’s share of the spoil;[74] for the Norman princes, like some more modern reformers, had the appetite of the dragon of Wantly—“houses and churches were to them geese and turkeys;” but archbishop Lanfranc, the first metropolitan under the Norman dynasty, a good man and a wise, stood in the gap, and saved his church from the tender mercies of a reform, which, being interpreted, would have been a robbery. He, again, had been himself a monk, and probably would on that account view the transgressions of the monks with more charity, and, perhaps, be personally less exposed to their malice. And, indeed, if there must needs be this division of seculars and regulars, it was a happy circumstance for the church, and we will add for the country (for with all its gross defects it was the fountain of life and light to the nation in those times), that the dignitaries were taken from both classes, though chiefly, no doubt, from the regulars; and that thus they mutually acted as checks upon those classes, in any momentary ebullitions of party spirit; not to say that those who were removed from the monastery to the mitre would find their past prejudices corrected by a new position and new interests, and by the discovery that men of their own order were not always the most dutiful of their sons. Thus in the working of the system, there were some of those selfcorrecting principles and balances brought into play which in part protected it from itself, and the like to which (though so often overlooked or undervalued) constitute the real worth of many a system which wears an unpromising aspect, and which, in spite of those querulous empirics who assure us that it ought to go intolerably wrong, persists in going tolerably right notwithstanding. This observation is thrown out merely to account for the long continuance of a system, containing within itself such active elements of ruin, as, abstractedly considered, might have been expected to put an end to it much sooner.

But this is not all. In our post-mortem examination of the Roman catholic church of England, undertaken with a view to ascertain the complicated disorders which made a way for its final dissolution, another feature presents itself akin to the last. William the Conqueror, who cared as little for the discipline of the church as for the laws of the land, thought proper to exempt a monastery which he had founded (that of St. Martin de Bello) from episcopal jurisdiction altogether. From this moment a mad ambition drove the monks of the principal religious houses to seek for themselves a similar privilege. Baldwin, abbot of St. Edmunds (Bury), at that time one of the finest foundations in England, obtained such exemption from pope Alexander, although, in the deed which conferred it, and which was executed before the year 1073, the pope, as if lending himself to a transaction hitherto unattempted and unheard of, expresses himself with some reserve—“as far as the thing could be done, salvâ primatis obedientiâ,” consistently with obedience to the primate. Lanfranc, however, then archbishop, who watched over the interests of the church (as we have already seen) with a cautious and prophetic eye, took away this dangerous privilege from the abbot, on his return to England, and reduced him to submission. But less resolute men, such as Radulph, William, and Theobald, succeeding him in the primacy, and the liberties of the church of England having been, in the mean while, crippled by the machinations of Rome, the monks took courage, and, feeling their own strength, claimed exemption from the jurisdiction of archbishops as well as bishops, as a matter of right; and, producing certain charters of ancient date (so they pretended), granted to them by popes or princes, carried their suit into the courts of Rome, and got it confirmed. This dispensation, bad in theory, was not better in practice. The monks of Malmesbury, for instance, had lately (about A. D. 1180) elected an abbot. The bishop of Salisbury interdicts the abbot elect from receiving the benediction at any other hands than his own; whereupon the latter goes into Wales, and procures it from the bishop of Landaff (for the Welsh church was still independent of England); on this the archbishop suspends the abbot until he can justify his disobedience by producing his letters of exemption. The abbot presents to the archbishop his charter, which turns out to be faulty in the style, the thread, and the seal, and which savours little of the court of Rome. The bishop asserts it to be spurious, and exhibits many professions of submission on the part of the abbots of Malmesbury, made to him or his predecessors. The abbot is contumacious, declares that he holds himself bound to answer to no superior, whether bishop or archbishop, but to the pope only; and adds, “poor and miserable is the abbot who does not utterly annihilate the jurisdiction of a bishop, when, for a single ounce of gold a year, he may buy full liberty for himself from Rome.” The archbishop, therefore, entreats the pope not to aid and abet this turbulent person; and, at the same time, bitterly laments the injury done, not to the bishops only, but to the whole church, by these papal exemptions—exemptions which had proved ruinous to the peace, discipline, and good order of the monasteries themselves which enjoyed them.[75]

Here, therefore, was a rift in the church, which time only widened, and which unfitted it for sustaining a storm whenever it should come. But the mischief did not end here. Long before the monks had escaped from the eye of their bishop, they had relaxed from the Sabine simplicity of their primitive institutions; now that they were left at liberty to do what seemed good in their own sight, matters went worse. Giraldus Cambrensis, a writer of the twelfth century, tells us, that on his return from abroad (he had been prosecuting his theological studies at Paris) he dined with the monks of Canterbury. Having eaten of their bread, he lifts up his heel against them, and maliciously exposes their bill of fare. It is curious as a picture of the times:—sixteen lordly dishes and upwards, besides a course of herbs, which latter, however, were not in much request; fish of divers kinds—roast and boiled, stewed and fried; omelets, seasoned meats, and sundry provocatives of the palate, prepared by cunning cooks; wines in ample profusion; sicera, piment, claret, must, mede, and moretum (mulberry),—any thing and every thing but ale, the boast of England, and more especially of Kent. “What would Paul the Hermit have said to all this?” thinks the splenetic Giraldus to himself, “or St. Anthony? or St. Benedict, the founder of the order?”[76] Such evidence, however, is to be received with considerable suspicion. There was for ages before their suppression, a run at the monks. A strong party spirit discovers itself in almost all that relates to the church in these middle ages, much as we are told of the harmony that prevailed in it before the reformation. The writer just quoted was a Welsh archdeacon, very far from a good-natured Sir Hugh, who would “persuade a man not to make a star-chamber matter of it;” on the contrary, he finds nothing as it should be: he is one of those dissatisfied spirits that delight in the study of morbid anatomy; neither monks nor bishops please him; he vexes himself because he cannot make a hundred watches go by his own, never suspecting that, after all, his own may be wrong; and, in his memoir of the Rights and Conditions of the Church of South Wales, he sums up the merits of the Cambrian Clergy with a testy anathema, something after the manner of Bruce’s benediction of the monks of Gondar, against the whole body, as traitors to him (though it does not appear that they had ever trusted him,) and to the liberties of the church to which they belonged.[77] But, when every allowance is made for the prejudice of the witnesses of the day, it is clear that by the thirteenth century, monks were no longer men of St. Benedict, and that another Dunstan, or a better man, was wanted to revive the monastic spirit, and to recover for the regulars the credit they had lost. Accordingly, in this century, the mendicant orders recently brought into being—the maggots not so much of corrupted texts as of corrupted times—found their way into England. The Franciscans, or Friars Minors, the Dominicans, or Black Friars; the Carmelites, or White Friars; and the Augustins, or Grey Friars; were the four divisions. Of these the two former were the most considerable; the Franciscans were the chief of all. The first settlement of these last was at Canterbury, in 1234; that of the Dominicans, thirteen years earlier, at Oxford; at which place, as well as at Cambridge, all the four orders soon found themselves in possession of flourishing houses.[78] There was much to captivate in their prospectus. All worldly views they renounced; they depended upon the alms of the people; and the people, admiring their disinterestedness, and reverencing their piety (which was, or which seemed to be, much beyond that of the monks,) were cheerful givers. They cultivated learning with great success; filled the professors’ chairs in the universities; searched out manuscripts, and multiplied the copies; collected libraries at any cost (for their popularity furnished them with the means); not a treatise on the arts, theology or the civil law appeared, but the friars bought it up. They improved the architecture of their country; for though their vow, like that of the Rhecabites, scarcely allowed them to sow seed or plant vineyards, or have any, it did not deny to them the building of houses; and, accordingly, on these were lavished the ample sums which the munificence of their benefactors poured into their treasury. It was the ambition of the great and noble that their bones should rest within these hallowed walls; and sumptuous shrines bespoke the mighty dead that slept in the chapel of St. Francis. All this might be well; but your friar was a sturdy beggar, and prosperity made him forget himself. He learned to drop the literary and religious character, and assume the politician. He engaged in diplomacy; mixed in the intrigues of courts; discussed treaties, formed alliances, and resolutely maintained the authority of the pope (whose creature he was) against all the princes and prelates of Christendom. He was furnished by his master with powers for effecting all this; and these he used to the confusion both of seculars and monks. He could preach where he would, if he could not lawfully take possession of the church of the minister, he could erect his ambulatory pulpit at any cross, in any parish, and rail (as he generally did) at the supineness and ignorance of the resident pastor. If he chanced to be received under the parsonage roof (as he seldom was,) he was felt to be a snake in the grass ready to betray his host in return for his hospitality; and, if he saw a fowl or a flask on his table, to denounce him, in his next day’s harangue, as a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber.[79] He could confess whosoever might come to him. It was to no purpose that a parish priest refused absolution to any black sheep of his flock; away he went to a Franciscan, and absolution was given him at once; the more readily, indeed, as an opportunity was thus afforded the friar of expressing his contempt of every ecclesiastical body but his own. Nor did he enter into the labours of the parochial minister only; he had nobler game in another class of seculars—the cathedral clergy. These he reduced to poverty, and the venerable edifices to which they belonged to decay. The cathedrals were erected and maintained by the proceeds of lands—endowments for the most part received from kings, as the parish churches were generally endowed by lords of manors; and dioceses, even in this day, would be found, we suspect, on a careful examination, to have a more than imaginary reference in their dimensions to the limits of the several Saxon kingdoms into which the island was divided, as parishes certainly have a reference to the estates of individuals. They were further supported by pentecostals, which was an annual composition paid by every household at Pentecost; as an acknowledgement of attachment to the mother church; and, lastly, by benefactions, oblations, and obits, the free-will offerings of the multitude. For a long time these two latter sources of revenue were very considerable. The people had a pride and pleasure in contributing to the erection, the repairs, and the maintenance of these beautiful structures, which were at once the goodly ornaments of the districts in which they stood; the temples of God, to whose service the pious felt themselves thus giving back a part of what he had freely conferred on them; and the tombs of their fathers; for it was the desire of those simple days to be buried near the grave of some man of God, whose memory was fragrant among them, and to lay their bones beside his bones. But the friars poisoned the minds of the people, and shook this allegiance. St. Francis was above all the saints, not to say above the Saviour himself. To die in the weeds of a Franciscan, was to die the death of the righteous: and to repose after death in a Franciscan monastery, was to have angels for the guardians of your sepulchre. Accordingly, about the fourteenth century, the pentecostals began to be evaded; recovery was to be made of them by force of law; and free-will offerings to the cathedrals ceased altogether. The number of residentiaries was consequently reduced (a measure of necessity, which involved much subsequent inconvenience and legal dispute,) and the buildings themselves were with difficulty preserved from the injuries of time.[80] Neither did the schism end here. Before, however, we go further, it may due to ourselves to remark, that it is not because an historian of the reformation, protestant though he be, finds pleasure in thus uncovering the nakedness of the Roman catholic church, that he dwells so exclusively on its peccant parts, nor yet because he is not aware that better things may be said of it; but simply because his subject leads him to develope those defects, both in its doctrine and discipline which paved the way for its eventual overthrow, not to recount the virtues which, in spite of such defects, preserved it so long. At the same time, he naturally feels some satisfaction in vindicating his own church from a comparison by which it is thought to suffer, and which represents it as full of discord and division, whilst the church which it supplanted was at unity with itself. Such was not, we see, the case. Time has, indeed, hushed all report of the bickerings of men who lived three or four centuries ago, and it may be invidious to awake the echo; but tenderness to the dead must not betray us into injustice to the living, and however error may be concealed, it must not be consecrated by the grave. But to return: hitherto we have represented the friars as the enemies of the secular clergy only, whether cathedral or parochial. They had their stone, however, to cast at the monks. It was their pleasure to contrast their own affected poverty (which lasted just so long as they could not help it) with the gallant bearing, profuse expenditure, and ample retinues of these latter, who, in their turn, expressed their contempt for them, not the less cordially, perhaps from a consciousness that the contrast was striking. In a manuscript which once belonged to a learned Benedictine, and is now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, is a drawing of four devils hugging four mendicant friars, one of each order, with great familiarity and affection.[81] But other weapons, offensive and defensive, were used besides ridicule. Thus the greater monasteries would occasionally rouse themselves, and found a small college or hall at the universities for their own novices, that they might not resign to their antagonists, without a struggle, the entire possession of those ancient seats of learning. So, again, when their members proceeded to degrees, they would often do it with studious costs and popular display, turning the occasion into a holiday spectacle, which might be set in balance against the miracles, mysteries, and other theatrical attractions of the mendicants.[82] These latter, however, might have long laughed at such artifices, had they continued true to one another; but the arrow which pierced them to the heart was feathered from their own wing. Their principles, like those of modern dissenters, propagated schism; they split amongst themselves; and the four orders tore the coat, which should be without seam, into as many parts. Mutual abuse, instead of cordial co-operation, was their maxim. The poor ploughman who sought instruction in his creed at the hands of the Friars Minors, was only told, as he valued his soul, to beware of the Carmelites; the Carmelites promoted his edification by denouncing the Dominican; the Dominicans in their turn by condemning the Augustins. “Be true to us,” was the language of each; “give us your money, and you shall be saved without a creed.”[83] Indeed, the frailty of human nature soon found out the weak places of the mendicant system. Soon had the primitive zeal of its founders burnt itself out; and then its censer was no longer lighted with fire from the altar:—a living was to be made. The vows of voluntary poverty only led to jesuitical expedients for evading it; a straining at gnats and swallowing of camels. The populace were to be alarmed, or caressed, or cajoled out of a subsistence. A death bed was a friar’s harvest; then were suggested the foundation of chantries, and the provision of masses and wax-lights. The confessional was his exchequer; there hints were dropped that the convent needed a new window, or that it owed “fortie pound for stones.” Was the good man of the house refractory? The friar had the art of leading the women captive, and reaching the family purse by means of the wife.[84] Was the piety of the public to be stimulated? Rival relics were set up, and impostures of all kinds multiplied without shame, to the impoverishment of the people, the disgrace of the church, and the scandal of Christianity.

It is revolting to bear record of these villanies—to see sordid advantage taken of the most sacred feelings of mankind, and religion itself subjected to suspicion through the hypocrisy of its professors. But, however humiliating may be the confession, experience has sanctioned it as a truth, that an indigent church makes a corrupt clergy; that in order to secure a priesthood which shall wear well, a permanent provision must be set aside for their maintenance—such a provision as shall induce men duly qualified, to enter the church, for it is visionary to suppose that temporal motives will not have their weight in this temporal state of things; and it is unreasonable to expect that persons who are excluded by the rules of society from the usual inlets to wealth, the courts, the camp, or the exchange, and who cannot but know or feel, when they are honestly doing their duty, that they are as good commonwealth’s men, to put it upon no higher ground, as any others, and therefore have as good a right to its liberal regards as any others, should be content to waive this right;—such a provision as shall be enough to ensure recruits for the priesthood from all ranks, the highest as well as those below, and so to ensure their easy intercourse with all ranks; for the leaven should leaven the whole lump;—such a provision as should encourage them to speak with all boldness, crouching to no man for their morsel of bread, nor tempted to lick the hand that feeds them;—such a provision as should prevent the meanness of their condition from prejudicing the force of their reasons, or give occasion to a high-minded hearer to accuse their plain speech of unmannerly presumption. Surely, until we can find such a church upon earth, in all her members, and in all the successive generations of her members, as can be true to the image of our Lord, it is a vision indeed to reject all adventitious support, such as her condition may require, and to say with the great puritan poet, that she should be content, as he was, to ride upon an ass.”[85]

It is needless to add, that the friars at length became as rottenness to the bones of the Roman catholic church; that, by the time of Erasmus and Luther, they were the butt at which every dissolute idler, on every tavern bench, discharged his shaft, hitting the establishment, and religion itself, through their sides; that they were exhibited in pot-house pictures as foxes preaching, with the neck of a stolen goose peeping out of the hood behind; as wolves giving absolutions, with a sheep muffled up in their cloaks; as apes sitting by a sick man’s bed, with a crucifix in one hand, and with the other in the sufferer’s fob.[86] Still the disaffection which this ridicule both indicated and promoted, was in some degree neutralised. There was, something, after all, in the constitution of such an order as the friars, which gratified the feelings of the people, and which led to their continued toleration, if not to their aggrandisement. They were, for the most part, men of themselves; they were the democratic portion of the church. It no doubt flattered the vanity of the peasant or mechanic, to see his own flesh and blood bearding the first-born of Egypt with whom he was brought into contact, or rather collision, in the members of the old and orthodox abbeys; nor would it be less grateful perhaps, to an unlettered man to hear the clerk of his own name, and of his own breeding, starting and maintaining with vast pertinacity theological subtleties, which had little other merit, to be sure, than that of being in opposition to received opinions, and an assertion of the right of every man to think for himself, however ill he might be qualified for doing so to advantage.

Then, again the pope was a tower of strength to the mendicant orders. They were the men of his right hand; and it may be observed, that when the Reformation came on, which was, amidst other and nobler interests concerned, a struggle in the first instance between the king and the pope for the mastery, the smaller monasteries (which were those of the friars) were the first confiscated by Henry; for he considered them the barracks from which his most inveterate enemies issued to the contest, prepared to maintain the cause of their sovereign lord the pope against any and every antagonist. Lastly, it is not to be forgotten, that the cloak of the friar was the refuge for a class of men who would now be supported by parish relief, and though in both cases the idle might often be enabled hereby to enter into the labours of others, yet often again assistance would be thus administered to the blameless sufferer, and the load of life on the whole be lightened to the poor.

Such were some of the circumstances that still upheld the mendicants even in the days of their degeneracy, when the spirit was gone that had urged them indeed to enthusiastic extravagances and puerile superstitions, but which was respected because it was thought to be sincere; and when little remained behind but a caput mortuum of unmeaning forms of devotion, and crafty contrivances for gain.

CHAPTER III.

PROGRESS OF GRIEVANCES UNDER THE NORMAN PRINCES.—PAPAL INTERFERENCE.—LEGATES.—COLLISION OF ROMAN AND ENGLISH FORMS OF LAW.—INCONVENIENCES ATTENDING IT.

It has been already observed that the distance of England from Italy, which had helped to deliver our borders from the political tyranny of imperial Rome, served also to protect the liberties of our church from the spiritual thraldom of papal Rome. The inhabitants of this island, entirely cut off from the rest of the world, were happily abandoned to their own devices. They were themselves the best judges of their own wants, and of the institutions which were suited to their own habits and circumstances; and though some time might elapse whilst they were thus groping out their way, which might have been saved by accepting foreign guidance, and though some rude traces of their slow and tentative progress towards their end might even afterwards appear in the results of their labours, still it was most desirable in the establishment of a church that it should gradually adapt itself in its growth and formation to the wants, the wishes, and the actual condition of the country. The least of all seeds was then most likely to become the greatest of trees, when it was left to thrive alone (occulto velut arbor ævo); when its roots were quietly suffered to feel for the soil that fed them best, and its branches to stretch out their arms towards the quarter of the heavens which proved the most genial. The spirit of Christianity itself, at its first appearance, invited this forbearance on the part of those amongst whom it came, not meddling bodily with the civil or political rights of the nations it visited, and leaving their laws and forms of government, in their letter at least, just what it found them.

Thus in England the church and state for a long time grew up together, the pope occasionally interfering, though generally on invitation, and scarcely ever in a manner to disturb the harmony of the system. In Saxon times, we find the prelate and the king friends and fellow-workers together—the one teaching the people, the other taking an interest in his office, and making provision for its permanent continuance. The same good understanding which subsisted between the bishop and the sovereign, subsisted also between the priest and the noble: here, again, the one communicated a knowledge of God’s laws to the inhabitants of the manor, the other encouraged the good work, and secured a similar benefit to his estate for ever by a fixed endowment; for in those days there was a belief that the foundations of a state were best laid in religion, and that persons were better subjects and better citizens in proportion as they were better men. Did difficulties present themselves in questions ecclesiastical; were obstacles to be removed, or improvements to be made, or observances to be enforced, the nation had that within itself which usually supplied the remedy. Matters were transacted within the four seas. Civil interpositions, e. g. whether of the king or the great council, protected the persons and estates of the clergy, determined the union or dissolution of dioceses, directed the recovery of tithes; defined and punished sacrilege, prescribed and limited the right of sanctuary, insisted upon the observance of the Sabbath, and fined for the contempt of it.[87] Were the laws to be administered? Still there was the same intimate union maintained between clerical and secular interests. The bishop or his deputy (the missus episcopi) presided with the alderman in the county court, with the cent-grave in the hundred, with the town-reeve in the borough, with the steward of the manor in each parish; and judicial decisions which thus proceeded from the temporal and spiritual authorities combined were received with a respect which neither party could have secured for them, if acting alone.[88] Meanwhile all collision of church and state was avoided, and a wholesome sympathy sprung up between them as they mutually shed an influence on each other. William, however, was jealous of the clergy, and it must be confessed that Dunstan had not done much to make them find favour in the eyes of a high-spirited monarch. Accordingly, a measure which he had already adopted in his Norman dominions he extended to England, and separated the civil and ecclesiastical courts. The remote consequences of this innovation were the reverse of what was intended; but its direct effect was to withdraw considerable power from the hands of the bishop; to diminish his income by the fines which fell to his share; and to withhold from him the opportunity of appearing to advantage before the people, who could not fail of drawing a comparison between him and the secular judges who sat with him; between the man of learning and the men of arms.[89] It was not till the end of the reign of Henry I. that the change began to make itself felt. Now, however, the clergy, no longer supported by the crown in the same degree as before, nor making common cause with the nobles, were unable to uphold the independence of the national church against the pope, who was waxing stronger every day; for he was even then no indifferent spectator of the affairs of nations, but was still on the watch ready to profit by the mistakes of others. Already he had made several unsuccessful attempts on the liberties of England. The case of Bishop Wilfrid was briefly alluded to in the first chapter. He was ejected from his see by Ecgfrid, king of Northumbria; he carried his complaints to Rome; it was the judgment of Pope Agatho in council that he had been unjustly deprived. After a while he returned to England and resumed his episcopal functions; but it was at the request of King Aldfrid, who had in the mean time succeeded Ecgfrid. This proves something; but the sequel of the story proves more. Wilfrid offends again—is again deprived; again appeals to Rome; and presents himself together with his accusers before Pope John, the successor of Agatho. Once more the decision is in favour of the bishop; and the pope on this occasion writes to the two kings, Ethelred and Aldfrid, to reinstall him in his see, from which it was his opinion, he had been unlawfully expelled. Ethelred (who had now abdicated in favour of Cœnred and had retired to a monastery) stood his friend, and advised compliance with the wishes of the pope; but Aldfrid scorned to receive him[90], and if we are to believe the bishop’s biographer, expressed in no very measured terms his contempt for papal rescripts.[91] But it cost him dear, his death following shortly after, which Bede insinuates was a judgment upon him for this act of contumacy.[92] This was about the year 704. Again, there exists a letter addressed to Pope Leo III. by the bishops and clergy of England, protesting against the necessity of their metropolitan spending his labour in travelling to Rome for the pall, or his money in purchasing it, when the early records of the church went to prove that some archbishops had not received it at all, and that none had bought it at a price; happy times, they add, in which the apostolic see did not expose itself to the reproach which St. Peter cast on Simon, “Thy money perish with thee.”[93] This was about the year 798. The pope, therefore, was ready to rush in with the first opportunity, and at length, one presented itself. William requested the assistance of Rome to remodel the English church after the great Norman revolution; his request, we may be sure, was readily complied with. Certain cardinal priests are despatched, who endeavour to approximate Rome and Canterbury, by preaching on behalf of the pope, the pall, personal homage to the apostolic see, and the right of investiture to bishoprics; and though efforts are made to saddle upon England a permanent representative of the pope, under the title of Legate (a name perhaps derived from the military officer whom the Roman emperors used to send out to govern a province), this latter proposal is for the present abortive. In some of the other measures they appear to have sped better; for we may observe that on the demise of each archbishop successively (with few exceptions) there now occurs a memorandum of a vacancy in the see of twelve months or more, during which it is reasonable to suppose that the metropolitan elect was making application to Rome personally, or by proxy, for confirmation of his appointment and peaceable possession of the mitre.[94] Sometimes this interval is protracted to several years, the right of investiture being in such cases most likely a bone of contention between the king and the pope, and the subject not admitting of a more speedy adjustment. Indeed, this was a question of great intricacy; one, in which the most dispassionate lookers on must have found it difficult to strike a balance between the evil and the good. If, on the one hand, the pope was permitted to present to the sees and abbeys of England, he would fill the country, perhaps with foreigners, certainly with creatures of his own, and then what was to become of the independence of the national church? On the other hand, if the king presented, rapacious as the early Norman monarchs were, he might make a profit of his privilege, put up the sacred offices to auction, as King Rufus actually did;[95] or retain in his own hands, as that same tyrant was found to have done at the day of his death, an archbishopric of Canterbury, the bishoprics of Winchester and Salisbury, together with a dozen good abbeys, and then what was to become of the very existence of the national church?[96] It was probably these latter considerations that induced Archbishop Anselm, a sincere friend and well-wisher, as it should seem, to his church, to throw it more effectually into the hands of the pope, by procuring from him an injunction that no prelate, abbot or priest, should receive investiture of any dignity ecclesiastical whatsoever from a layman. King Henry, perhaps unwilling to risk a rupture at one and the same time with his church at home, with a strong faction of his nobles who supported it, and gave evidence of their intention to do so with spirit by the oath they subsequently imposed upon Stephen[97], and with the papal power now grown formidable, gave way, and granted to the cathedrals and collegiate churches of his realm license to elect any of their own body into abbey or bishopric, thereby waiving a right which by an act of usurpation the kings had assumed since the conquest, of conferring mitres and monasteries on whom they would.[98] Thus the authority of the Saxon synod, in which the bishops and clergy combined with the king for ecclesiastical elections, was in some measure restored, and though certainly less independent and absolute than formerly,[99] it was something that it had again a voice: at present, it should appear, that the theory of ecclesiastical appointments was this, the chapters elected, the king approved, the pope confirmed the choice.[100] But there were here too many parties having too many conflicting interests to admit of perpetual harmony. Accordingly the struggle begins; and now the pope has his right of investiture; and now the king cripples it by suspending the temporalities of the see during its vacancy, and leaving his holiness nothing to present unto but the bare episcopal office;[101] and now he accepts the king’s candidate to the rejection of him whom the chapter had unanimously chosen;[102] and now again he seems to take upon himself the sole responsibility of the appointment on the principle that “my name is Leo.”[103] On the whole, the strife issued out as it was natural it should, in the despot; the pope prevailed; his legate (for by the end of the reign of Henry I. a legate had established a right of road into England) was ever upon the watch; and the opposition of the national clergy, which was considerable, to the advances of this active emissary, was taken off by identifying the legate with the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. This was a masterstroke of policy; it at once removed the leader of the insurgents, and grafting the unfounded pretensions of the legate on the acknowledged rights of the archbishop, made him in his latter character the best of stalking horses for papal encroachments. When the high spirit of the clergy would have tempted them to resist him in one capacity, their sense of what was due to him in his other capacity kept them in check; to abstract the legate from the metropolitan was impossible; the functions of the two were in constant conflict; and it must have been felt that there was a drag on the church which was pulling it in pieces. He, however, as the pope’s representative, continued to convene provincial synods and preside in them; to exercise all manner of jurisdiction; to withdraw from the cognisance of parliament ecclesiastical grievances; to interfere with the diocesan courts, and excite the just jealousy of the bishops by supplanting them in some of their most ancient and indisputable rights. Questions touching the probate of wills, administrations, appeals, visitations, and the like, afforded but too much opportunity for collision, and the church was scandalised by a contest, rather for the fees than for the faith.[104] Thus did the establishment suffer both from within and from without: from within, by the decay of all discipline; from without, by the forfeiture of all respect.

Nor was this all. Nothing contributes so much to disgust the public mind with the existing order of things as the faulty administration of justice. Let the people have justice purely, unexpensively, and expeditiously administered, and what chiefly concerns them in the government of a country is obtained. “I crave the law,” is the demand of any stout-hearted nation, and having gained this object, they are at peace. Now the ancient county-court was simple and satisfactory in its practice—it was the natural growth of the soil; suited to the wants of Englishmen, and consecrated by immemorial usage. The judiciary system introduced by the pope, on the other hand, into the diocesan courts, of which rescripts from Rome and (subsequently when the books of the civil law had been discovered) the old Roman jurisprudence were the basis, was tedious, costly, and what was perhaps worse than all, novel.[105] Even of those who had to administer it, there were some who did it reluctantly, strove to evade it, and adopted the trial by jury instead of the subtleties of the Roman law; but these innovations were accounted heretical, and prohibitions were issued against Grosthead, Bishop of Lincoln, and others, who had the courage or temerity to attempt them.[106] Still it was one thing to silence, and another to satisfy. Much inconvenience was felt by the people in consequence of “the law’s delay,” and a proportionate desire was created for a reformation of the system. The rolls of parliament, from Edward III. to Henry VIII., present numerous complaints to the Commons on the difficulties attending the probate of wills; and such there well might be, when, in addition to the parties already mentioned, the bishop and the legate, each of whom asserted his own exclusive right of probate, and referred his cause to the pope, a third party stepped in, under the title of legatus e latere, or special legate, who in his turn, contested the privileges of the legatus natus, and urged his own superior claim to the cognisance of all testamentary matters.[107] Nor were the grievances touching property more onerous than those which regarded domestic relationship. The regulations of marriage were intricate and vexatious: whilst it was maintained to be in itself a sacrament, and so indissoluble, the prohibited degrees were studiously multiplied, and thereby a pretence was furnished for a dissolution whenever it should be the pope’s pleasure to pronounce it. Thus did he hold in his hands, and determine by his legate, or by the dean of the arches, the legate’s deputy, the legitimacy of children, and the succession of families, separating those whom no man had a right to put asunder, and giving his sanction to unions which nature and Scripture forbade.

The progress of a cause, slow, of necessity by reason of the forms of the court, and the contradictions of the canons, was still further and more seriously impeded by appeals. By these, episcopal decisions were set at nought; and the more effectually as the court of the arches was invested with the power of suspending the process of the ordinary till the pope’s answer should be received, and often no doubt, till one or both of the litigants would be ready to exclaim with King Henry, whose divorce presents, in its seven years’ details, a splendid example of the grievances under which numbers of his subjects were suffering, with more right on their side—

——“I abhor

This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome.”

It would be a long labour, and one, perhaps of no great interest to the majority of our readers after all, to follow out this branch of our subject in all its extent. Suffice it, however, not to have passed over in silence so fruitful a source of popular discontent as abuses in the administration of the law—abuses which could fail of alienating multitudes from a church with which they were identified. It is not, perhaps, a circumstance less worthy of notice from being often overlooked, and whilst the more obvious evils which clamorously demanded redress are set forth to the full, one which touched men in their property, their affections—which met them in the affairs of “this working-day world” at every turn—is noticed casually, or not at all.

There may be those, indeed, who think that to dwell at so much length on the secondary and more disgraceful causes of the Reformation, is to detract from the character of that great event, and to tarnish its lustre; but they who regard God’s enemies as his instruments will not so account of it. They will see in the course given to those beggarly elements the same superintending hand that wrought the nourishment of Jacob’s household out of the sin of Jacob’s sons; so that whilst they wickedly sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites, God mercifully made it for good, sending him before them, by this means, to preserve them a posterity in the earth, and to save their lives by a great deliverance. They will see in it the same power at work that shaped the cruel decree of Pharaoh for the children to be cast into the river into an easy provision for bringing up Moses in the royal household, and thus fitting him to be the teacher and leader of Israel, by introducing him into all the wisdom of the Egyptians. They will see in it the same that achieved the salvation of the world itself, by Caiphas who declared that it was expedient for one man to die for the people, and by the wretches that cried, “Crucify him! crucify him!”

CHAPTER IV.

MONASTERIES.—THEIR USURPATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE CLERGY.—IMPROPRIATIONS.—EVILS OF THE SYSTEM.

With the causes already enumerated as those which worked the downfall of the Roman Catholic church, there conspired the ignorance and immoral lives of the clergy. A system of celibacy upon compulsion was sure to produce a system of profligacy. Yet the disgusting catalogue of offences alleged against the regulars, by the visiters of the monasteries, ought, perhaps, to be received with some caution. The commissioners were not unprejudiced judges. They knew full well, that the king, their master, was determined on the dissolution of the religious houses, and that, at all events, a quarrel was to be picked. Bad enough those houses probably were, but had they been better, their doom was sealed. The preamble of the act for dissolving the smaller ones on pretence of their corruption, proclaims that the greater were spared as being regular, devout, and praiseworthy; yet we know what followed.[108] The nunnery of Godstow, in Oxfordshire, was actually reported as exemplary; it was the school to which all the young gentlewomen of the country resorted. Their friends pleaded with the king to spare it, the inquisitors seconded their petition,—but they obtained for it no other boon than that it should be eaten up last. Voluntary confessions of guilt, which accompanied the surrender of the abbeys, are the mere suicidal confessions of a man upon the wheel, proof of nothing but of the pain or the hope which extorted them. The monks found that they could not save their ship, and therefore, they compromised, by stripping themselves naked, and trying for a plank. Had they stood upon their own innocence, they would have condemned the king, and still lost their estates; did they allow their guilt, they screened his rapacity, and received a see, a living, or a pension. The courtiers were interested in swelling the cry that such men were not fit to live. They, like the visiters, themselves hoped for a share of the golden eggs when they should have succeeded in killing the hen. “Wherefore this waste?” was their pretence; but they carried a bag of their own, which was to be filled out of their neighbour’s pocket; and, whatever might be the sin of sacrilege, “tithe corn,” thought they, “makes very good bread.” Here is no attempt or desire to defend these miserable monks in the teeth of damning facts—and some such, no doubt, there were to testify against very many of the monastic abuses—but it is nothing but justice, and the practice of every equitable court, to weigh the characters and prejudices, and private interests of the witnesses, when they would swear away a man’s life, substance, and good name; and, in the present instance, it is fair to adopt the same rule, were it only out of consideration to the many sincere, and humble, and righteous servants of God, that those religious houses contained within their walls, even in the midst of an adulterous and sinful generation; the faithful among the faithless; the many who had fled thither for shelter from the sorrows of life; the ambitious, with blithed hopes and a broken spirit, the gay with the experience of the wise man that all under the sun was vanity; the forlorn, whom the world had abandoned, and left to drift upon the rocks; the disappointed, whose course of true love might not have run smooth; these, and a thousand other malignant influences, contributed their victims to those “populous solitudes;” persons having now no other desire than to pass the time of their sojourning here in piety, in privacy, and in peace. This is a class to which it is impossible to refuse our sympathy, and whom it would be ungenerous and unjust to confound with the swarm of lazy, sensual, unlettered drones among whom it was their unhappy lot to live, and whom the shock of the Reformation dispersed. Exemption from episcopal visitation, and consequently from any inspection whatever, was the beginning of the evil. This privilege of the monasteries proved their poison: it was a short-sighted policy of the pope to hide them from the eye of the secular clergy, whose jealousy would have acted as a wholesome stimulant to the detection and correction of abuses. But the seculars he systematically slighted, and his iniquity eventually found him out. Then, again, came upon them an evil spirit which led them to grasp at the possession of all the benefices in the country. This was another effort to depress the working clergy, which the pope encouraged, but which, like the former, was, in the end, most injurious to his own authority, by bringing the clergy into contempt, and opening the eyes of the people, to the covetousness of the monks. The system of impropriations, which began with William the Conqueror, grew so rapidly that, in the course of three centuries, more than a third part of the benefices in England became such,[109] and those the richest, for the whiter the cow the surer was it to go to the altar, and by the time of the Reformation, there was added another third.[110] An attempt was made by the legislature to stay the evil, and the statute of mortmain was passed in the reign of Edward I., whereby it was enacted, that “no person, religious or other, should presume to buy or sell, or under any colour of donation, lease, or other title, to receive any lands or tenements, or by any act of invention to appropriate them, under pain of forfeiture of them.”[111] But the statute was evaded by royal dispensations, and the mischief grew. Even the pope himself took alarm (pavet ipse sacerdos); and Alexander, at the end of the twelfth century, writes to the Bishop of Worcester to admit no man to a vicarage on presentation of the monks, till they had assigned him, on the instant, such a portion of income as would suffice for the episcopal dues, and for the competent maintenance of the minister;[112] but this decree they set at naught by not presenting at all, either serving the churches by stipendiary curates, or (which was the readier way) leaving them altogether unserved.[113] By-and-by the example of the monasteries was followed by the chantries, colleges, hospitals, and nunneries; these, in their turn, learned the art of procuring impropriations;[114] nay, even corporations, transforming themselves, by a legal fiction, into religious societies, did the same; for before King Henry VIII. there seems to have been no precedent in England for a mere layman to be an impropriator.[115] The monks, however, had peculiar facilities for the accumulation of livings. Their influence with some neighbouring lord of a manor would often win him to make over the church on his estate, and the tithes with which it might be endowed, to their own abbey; they, meanwhile, undertaking to provide for the fulfilment of the ecclesiastical duties belonging to it. Then, again, if they could not beg they could buy, often the parish itself, as well as the benefice; or where the purchase was more circumscribed, the pope, ever their friend, would sometimes grant them the privilege of non-payment of tithes to the extent of such estate, to the great injury of the clergymen, when it happened to be considerable. Thus rectories were reduced to vicarages; the greater tithes going to the abbey fund, the small tithes left as a miserable stipend (often not more than a sixteenth part of the revenue of the benefice[116]) to the minister, who took the monks’ labouring oar under the title of vicarius. Thus originated that divorce between the property of the parish church and the minister of it, which continues in most instances of vicarages to this day; and thus it came to pass that town livings (contrary to all reason) are at present of all others, the poorest, less than the usual pittance of endowment having been left to them by the considerate monks, who reckoned, and perhaps rightly reckoned, in the days when masses were said, that a large population would supply by fees alone an adequate provision for the vicar. Meanwhile, the people were disgusted with this gross and cruel invasion of the rights of their pastors; and the representatives of the monasteries read themselves in amidst reproaches loud and deep, of the bystanders.[117] But they were not thin-skinned. They prepared, however, a sop for Cerberus, by exacting with little rigour the small tithes, or, in some cases, by accepting an easy composition instead of them; hoping, by such modus (decimandi) to purchase the more cheerful and prompt payment of the great tithes, which was their affair; and not at all uneasy because the propitiation happened to be made at the vicar’s expense.[118] Their only remaining concern was to find some “Sir Johns” (as the poor clergy were called before the Reformation,) sometimes with an honourable adjunct of “lack Latin,”[119] or “mumble-matins[120],” or “babbling Sir Johns,”[121] or “blind Sir Johns,”[122] as it might be, who were just qualified according to the letter of the law, to stand in the gap; mass-priests, who could read their breviaries, and no more—for in those days men seem to have received ordination without any adequate examination either as to learning or character[123]—persons of the lowest of the people, with all the gross habits of the class from which they sprung; loiterers on the alehouse bench;[124] dicers, scarce able to say by rote their Pater-noster, often actually unable to repeat the commandments;[125] divines every way fitted to provoke the 75th canon, which was no doubt, in the first instance levelled against them.[126] Such were the ministers to whom was consigned a very large proportion of the parishes of England before the Reformation; with what effect, the ignorance, the superstition, the vices which then spread themselves over the whole country, sufficiently testify. A feature or two of the times, such as have been preserved to us, are here offered to the reader, not, to be sure, always drawn by a very friendly hand, but still, in all probability, tolerably faithful. The prayers of the church, being in Latin, tended little or nothing to edification. Preaching there was scarce any. Quarterly sermons appear to have been prescribed to the clergy, but not to have been insisted upon; for though mass was on no account left unsaid for a single Sunday, sermons might be omitted for twenty Sundays together, and nobody be blamed.[127] The unpreaching prelate is honest Latimer’s by-word. Indeed, as the Reformation approached, as the stirring of the foundations began to make itself felt; to be a preacher was to be suspected of being a heretic.[128] The friars, to be sure, were not dumb dogs, but they barked to little purpose, in a manner to prove rather that they were hungry than watchful; their discourses having for their object rather to fill their own wallets than satisfy their hearer’s wants, and if not occupied with uncharitable invectives against other ecclesiastics, a tissue of fables and old wives’ tales.[129] Catechising, in the protestant sense of the term, was unknown or unpractised. When, indeed, it was perceived how powerful a weapon it was in the hands of the Reformers, steps were taken at the council of Trent for putting forth what was called a catechism. But the Trent catechism was composed avowedly for the instruction of the parish priests, not for the use of children, to whom it was not at all adapted; and, after all, the gross ignorance of the former must have made it a dead letter to most of them; utterly unintelligible so long as it remained in the learned language in which it was written, and if translated, (as it was, into Italian, French, German and Polish, whether into English we know not,) still containing too much special pleading, too obvious an anxiety for secular interests, too manifest an apprehension that the “craft was in danger,” too much doubtful or ridiculous theology, to stand against the strong blows of the men of the new learning. The Church Catechism, on the other hand, writ in our own mother tongue, brief, and, on the whole, of admirable simplicity; a manual which, elementary as it may be thought, no competent judge can examine without seeing that its authors must have been men mighty in those Scriptures, whereof, indeed, it is the essence, most patiently investigated, and most skilfully and scrupulously expressed; this wrought so effectually, that “now” (says an authority of the second year of Elizabeth, quoted by Strype) “a young child of ten years old can tell more of his duty towards God and man than a man of their bringing up can do in sixty or eighty years.”[130] Nay, of the Scriptures even the more learned clergy knew very little, the universities being taken up with popes’ laws and schoolmen. Indeed, it was difficult to meet with a copy of the Bible, or of any other profitable book of divinity in these seats of learning, so successfully had the friars bought them all up; and students, we are told, in the reign of Edward III. actually withdrew from them in consequence, and returned to their own homes;[131] nor does the study of the Scriptures appear to have had a chance against Scotus and Aquinas till Dean Colet established it at Oxford; and, about the same time, George Stafford, at Cambridge, by lectures on the books of Holy Writ.[132] The people at large, if possible, fared worse. They were debarred from all knowledge of their Bibles, either by the language in which they were written (for copies of Wickliffe’s translation were scarce), or, if not, by the price at which they were sold; the cost of Wickliffe’s New Testament, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, being four marks and forty pence, a sum equal to 2l. 16s. 3d. of present money.[133] Thus the multitude knew just so much of Scripture history, as the miracle plays taught them, and little more. To these burlesque and indecent caricatures of Holy Writ (though it is fair to say not so intended) the idle and the dissipated were the first to resort, as to fairs and revels, with which festivities, indeed, they ranked, so that, had they been better worth attention, it is probable that an attendance upon them would not have conduced much to edification. The Sabbath was rather a day of sports and pastimes than of devotion and instruction; of dancing, shooting with the bow, and practising with the buckler;[134] nor were these, it may be well imagined, the most culpable of its occupations. The churches were profaned. In the top of one of the pinnacles of St. Paul’s in London was Lollard’s tower, the prison, and often the grave of the saints. In the arches of the same cathedral were the ecclesiastical courts, of which the balance was not always the balance of the sanctuary, though in the sanctuary it was held. In the spacious nave was the exchange for the merchants (for Sir Thomas Gresham had not yet lived to remove the reproach), and the scene of all the brawlings of the horse-fair.[135] Payments of money were made at the font; and the crypt, or underground chapel, in which the early mass was said, was the trysting-place of the nightly revellers of either sex.[136] Nor were such abuses as these confined to London. The house of God, as it should seem from the homily “On the right Use of the Church,” was too generally the place of rendezvous for such as loved greetings in the market place, had tales to tell, or business to transact; and the devotions of the day were suffered to drag on like Pharaoh’s chariots with the wheels off, whilst many of the congregation were more profitably employed (as they thought) in the discussion of farm or merchandize, as they paced to and fro along its aisles. It is to these and similar acts of irreverence that the canons have respect in the directions they give to churchwardens and questmen—directions which a change in the manners of the times has rendered obsolete and almost unintelligible;[137] and it may be reasonably supposed, that in the ordering of our church ceremonies, and in the composition of our church service itself, the principle of fully and fervently occupying all who were within the walls in their devotions was studiously kept in sight by the reformers; and that the sacrifice of prayer and praise should no longer be considered the exclusive office of the priest, as it had been too much in papal times, the people looking on, but that every member should be called upon at intervals, and those of short and frequent recurrence, the whole service through, to testify, by lifting up his voice in confession or response, that he, too, had a lively interest in the common work before them, of besetting God, as it were, in a round (so the quaint old Fuller expresses it), and not suffering him to depart till he had blessed them—“hæc vis grata Deo.” The saints’ days and holidays, again, were numerous, even to the hinderance of a harvest, and to the certain and perpetual encouragement of riot and revelry throughout the country.[138] Taverns and alehouses, little better than brothels, with their dishonest games of cards, dice, backgammon, tennis, foot-ball, quoits, drained the pockets of their votaries, and sent them to rob on the highway. So says Sir Thomas More, who might, perhaps, have excepted the more athletic sports here enumerated from his anathema, and thereby have rendered it more effective.[139] The due punishment of the culprits was rendered difficult by the places of refuge afforded them in the precincts of religious houses, which were the thieves’ paradise;[140] and though felons of all kinds could here claim sanctuary, even for life, so that they would actually sally forth by night to rob or slay, and return before day-break to their asylum within the rules with impunity, yet to the poor persecuted Lollard was the gate of mercy closed, and he might be legally pursued even unto the horns of the altar.[141] The friar, meanwhile, went on with his mumpsimus. His most constant hearers (so profitable was his teaching) were at a loss to distinguish between the deadly sins and the ten commandments;[142] of which latter, indeed, as of the articles of the belief in English, the people were entirely ignorant, being wholly given to superstitions.[143] They hastened to the churches for holy water, of which the devil was said to be afraid, before a thunder-storm;[144] fled to St. Rooke in time of pestilence; in an ague, to St. Pernel, or master John Shorne; being Welshmen, and disposed to take a purse, they besought the help of Darvel Gathorne; if a wife were weary of her husband, she betook herself to St. Uncumber,[145] they repaired to the wise woman to recover what they had lost, or to be recruited from a sickness; and addicted themselves with all their might to magic, sorcery, charms, and the black art.[146] The grossest pretensions which indulgences could advance were swallowed; and not strained at. Relics, carrying imposture on their very face, (“lies,” in the language of Scripture,) were kissed with pious credulity. Pilgrimages were undertaken in the spirit of the company in the Canterbury Tales, or of Ogygius in his journey to our lady of Walsingham;[147] and yet were reckoned acts that would be accounted to the parties for righteousness: and, whilst no man brought his gift to the altar of his Saviour in Canterbury cathedral throughout a whole year, offerings were made at the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket in the same place, and during the same period, to the amount of nearly a thousand pounds.

No wonder that in these ages of darkness doctrines not found in the word of God, but of which we have seen that the germ existed even in the Saxon church, should have shot up with vigour like the gourd of Jonah in the night; or that, in the absence of Scripture to speak for itself, the religion of Rome (as Latimer observes) should have passed for it.[148]

CHAPTER V.

EARLY REFORMERS.—WALDENSES.—WICKLIFFE.—LOLLARDS.

Meanwhile a little leaven was at work, which served still to keep a better faith alive; a little salt of the earth which prevented the great carcase of human nature from offending the nostrils of its Creator. The Almighty has been ever wont to make such provision for the continuance of sound doctrine. Whilst all flesh was corrupting its way, still a household or two were left to keep his name from perishing, and to rally the true religion again—an Enos, an Enoch, or a Noah. When idolatry had once more spread itself over the world, almost to the extinction of the knowledge of the Most High, a few chosen vessels were left to the preservation of it still—an Abraham, a Lot, a Melchizedec, a Job. Generations rolled on, and God thought fit to act on a greater scale, but still on the same principle; and the Israelites were separated from mankind as a peculiar people, as the depositaries of the creed of man; and their fortunes were so shaped as to occasion their dispersion amongst the Gentiles, with the Bible in their hearts, and hands; and thus were they made the channels through which the will and works of God were communicated to those who would otherwise have sat in darkness; and to this origin, perhaps, rather than to be unassisted efforts of natural reason, is to be referred the more sublime part of the philosophy of the heathens.[149]

So it was, in a degree, during the times of papal ignorance; for though to the question, which the Romanists taught every priest that could scarce read his breviary to ask, “Where was the religion of protestants before Luther?” it was sufficient to say, as it was said, “In the Bible;” still even in the darkest times, it had many faithful witnesses to produce besides, and both in individuals and in whole congregations might even then be read the eloquent chapters of the good man’s life. Thus, whilst the pope was grasping at universal power, and the monks were busy in seconding his efforts, and councils were giving authority to abuses both doctrinal and practical, on which his usurpation was grafting itself, and wars were waged between the several ecclesiastical orders, to the ruin of that which is the keystone of the gospel, charity, and ignorance was becoming more dense, and manners more profligate, there was abiding amongst the recesses of the Alps a race of hardy mountaineers, who held (as they still hold after ages of poverty and oppression) the essential articles of the reformed faith, and to whom it had been apparently derived from the apostles themselves:—Vaudois, Valenses, or Waldenses, was the name of this primitive people, dwelling as they did in the valleys of the Cottian Alps—a name which, though at first like that of Albigenses and Romanists, having a reference to the local habitation of the persons who bore it, eventually embraced a large and widely scattered sect which professed certain religious opinions, and on more occasions than one sealed them with their blood. For that they took their title or origin from Peter Waldo, the heretic of Lyons, as the catholics pretend, is not to be admitted. He was excommunicated by the archbishop of that place, in 1172, and is not mentioned before the year 1160, whereas there is evidence that the Vaudois existed as a distinct society at least half a century earlier; and it is probable that the Subalpini, and Paterines, a more ancient name still, men who worshipped the God of their fathers after a manner which the church of Rome called heresy, were but the same Waldenses, under a prior designation. Certain it is, that no shadow of proof exists of Peter Waldo having ever set foot in Piedmont, and a substantial difference may be descried between his followers and the church of the Alps, that whilst the former assumed the functions of the clerical office without hesitation, the latter constantly and scrupulously insisted upon a regular call to the priesthood, and imposition of hands.[150] Indeed, the episcopal form of church government was faithfully preserved among them, till poverty, aggravated by a dreadful pestilence in the early part of the seventeenth century, threw them for resources upon Switzerland, which very naturally sent them, together with clerical recruits, (for only two out of the thirteen barbes or pastors had been left alive,) her liturgy, her presbyterian constitution, and her cold and unattractive ritual.[151] Among many of their tenets to which their enemies bear witness, we find that they gave no credit to modern miracles, rejected extreme unction, held offering for the dead as nothing worth except to the priest, neglected the festivals, denied the doctrines of transubstantiation, purgatory, and invocation of saints, and held the church of Rome (not an uncommon opinion in the thirteenth century[152]) to be the woman in scarlet of the Revelations. From La Nobla Leçon, a certain poem of their own, of unsuspected authority and very ancient date, for it was written about the year 1100, we may further gather in addition to the particulars already given, that the commandments were taught by them; not excepting that against idols, and the worship of the Trinity, though without a word in favour of the Virgin. Slanderous tongues would indeed “have done them to death;”—things which they knew not were wantonly and wickedly laid to their charge; many, of the same kind, urged in the same spirit, and with the same regard to consistency, as the charges objected to the first Christians by the heathens of old time. They were dissolute libertines, and they were ascetic precisians; they used the Lord’s Prayer only, and yet they prayed at greater or less length seven times a day; they permitted laymen to consecrate the elements, and yet they had priests, and, as some said, three orders of priests; they allowed the former also to receive confessions, yet they rejected the confessional; they would have ecclesiastics supported by alms, and they denounced the mendicant orders as Satan’s own invention;—non hæc satis inter se conveniunt. Archbishop Usher has been at the pains to collect and compare the manifold accusations cast in their teeth and makes it manifest that “the testimony agreeth not together.”[153] Here, however, were many of the principal tenets of the reformed faith, long before the time of Luther:—in the fastnesses of these mountains (to use the language of bishop Jewel) were they found, even as it was in such places, that the older prophets prophesied from the Spirit of God. The Vaudois extended themselves. They sent forth a colony to Calabria which was basely and barbarously put to the sword, when the signs of the times foreboded a reformation in Italy; and struck the pope with “fear of change.” A settlement so distant could not affect England, or if so, very indirectly. But another division of the same people migrated to Bohemia; and the intercourse between England and that country in the time of Wickliffe was considerable. Natives of Bohemia were then students at Oxford;[154] and Richard II. chose a Bohemian princess for his queen. The partiality which she herself (as indeed her nation in general) manifested for the writings of our early reformer is an indication of some sympathy between the parties. The good seed must have fallen on ground prepared to receive it, or it would not have shot up so vigorously; and it is probable that the early heresy of Bohemia might help to raise up a Wickliffe for England, as he paid the debt back by giving to Bohemia a Huss and a Jerome. Certain it is, that catholic writers of the greatest authority, in treating of the doctrines of Wickliffe, have considered him as adopting those of the Waldenses, by whatever means he had become acquainted with them; and the Vaudois to this day claim a fraternal feeling as due to themselves from England, on the same ground.[155] Mr. Wordsworth, whose “Ecclesiastical Sketches” are in general scarcely more remarkable for their poetry than for their historical accuracy, points at this connection in his Sonnet on the Waldenses:—

These who gave the earliest notice, as the lark

Springs from the ground the morn to gratulate:

Who rather rose the day to antedate,

By striking out a solitary spark,

When all the world with midnight gloom was dark.

These harbingers of good, whom bitter hate

In vain endeavoured to exterminate,

Fell obloquy pursues with hideous bark;

But they desist not; and the sacred fire,

Rekindled thus, from dens and savage woods

Moves, handed on with never-ceasing care,

Through courts, through camps, o’er limitary floods;

Nor lacks this sea-girt isle a timely share

Of the new flame, not suffered to expire.”

Some, again, of the same persecuted race repaired to Provence and Languedoc, where they were known by the name of Albigenses, or heretics of Albi (perhaps the parent stock of the present protestants in the south of France); and on being driven thence, as they were driven thither by the inquisition and the sword, sought shelter in the neighbouring district of Guienne, then in possession of the English, and thus possibly found a way for themselves or their tenets, or both, into Britain by another channel. But, in truth, such opinions as those entertained by the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Bohemians, and the Lollards (for by this latter name the disciples of Wickliffe were distinguished—a name probably given to them as being tares, lolium, amongst the wheat,) had quietly diffused themselves over a great part of Christendom, in spite of the unrighteous pains taken by the church of Rome to put down all overt expression of them. Springing up in various and distant spots of Europe, they gradually became (so to speak) confluent. Nor is it impossible to trace the means by which this might be effected. The intercourse of mankind was considerable in those days; greater, perhaps, than we are apt to imagine, in this age of stage-coaches, canals, railroads, and steam-boats. Pilgrimages promoted travelling to an extent now almost incredible;—every country took care to be provided with some bait or other for the holy palmer, and the more distant the journey the more meritorious the service. Vessels were regularly freighted with pilgrims. Licenses were granted by King Henry VI. in one year for the exportation of 2433 pilgrims to St. James of Compostella.[156] The wife of Bath

“Thries had been at Jerusaleme,

She hadde passed many a strange streme,

At Rome she hadde ben, and at Boloine,

At Galice, at Saint James, and at Coloine.”

Rome indeed, the heart as it were of Christendom, was perpetually receiving and expelling a current of idle or devout dwellers in every region under heaven, and was thus circulating, intelligence of all kinds through all lands. The home circuit was still more trodden; 100,000 pilgrims, we are told, visited St. Thomas à Becket in a single year.[157] Commerce was then comparatively little, but it was carried on in a manner to secure much personal communication. Fairs, which continued a fortnight or three weeks, and whilst they continued, transformed a desolate heath perhaps, into a temporary city, with streets and shops, and houses, and “all appliances to boot,” destined to disappear once more when the mart was over, like a vision of fairy land, drew together from all quarters merchants, both native and foreign. Universities were not places of resort for the youth of the mother-country only, but were filled with students of divers nations; for, Latin being the conventional language of them all, no man, from whatever country, was excluded by the want of the vernacular tongue.[158] The same circumstance afforded to professors a facility of migrating from one university to another, as occasions might present themselves, without the tax of learning a new vocabulary. Minstrels were ever upon the stroll from abbey to abbey,—the welcome carriers of news to the secluded but inquisitive monks; and freemasons, a kind of nomad race, pitched their tents wherever they found occupation, and having reared the cathedral or the church with admirable art, journeyed on in search of other employers. Finally, the Italians and other aliens, who by favour of the pope were put in possession of church livings in every country to which his authority extended, furnished another channel of international communication. In the reign of Henry III., the annual value of the benefices so disposed of in England was 70,000 marks, a sum more than triple the whole revenue of the crown.[159] These were some of the many ways in which the intercourse of mankind was maintained in those primitive times, and the circulation of any popular doctrine effectually secured, whatever obstacles might be opposed to it. Thus it was that the principles of the Reformation were slowly and silently making their way through Europe, when perhaps their progress was little suspected; and one of those under currents was setting in which are not in the end less powerful because they happen for a season to be unobserved. It is singular, that when Dante conducts his hero to that quarter of the infernal regions where the heretics are paying the penalty of their sin, being condemned to stand upon their heads in jars of fire, he adds a remark indicative of the temper of the times, and much to our present purpose, that these fiery sepulchres were filled with victims to a number far beyond all expectation.[160] Wickliffe, we know, found himself very quickly at the head of a numerous and powerful body in England, simply because he furnished a mouth-piece to those who had not as yet mustered courage to speak out for themselves, so mistaken is the conclusion of the Roman catholic, that the unity of his church is to be inferred from its silence. A third part of the clergy, Wickliffe himself tells us, thought with him on the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, and “would defend that doctrine on payne of theyr lyfe;” and Knighton, a contemporary writer, affirms, that you could not meet two people in the way but one of them was a disciple of Wickliffe.[161] Moreover, when he was cited before the bishops at Lambeth, it was not merely the influence of the Duke of Lancaster that protected him, as a useful partisan, but the multitude clamoured for his release, as a teacher of the truth; or “his person was saved out of the hands of his enemies,” (so says Fuller in his own inimitable manner) “as was once the doctrine of his godly namesake; they feared the people; ‘for all men counted John that he was a prophet indeed.’”[162] The moment was peculiarly propitious to the extension of Wickliffe’s opinions. The schism in the papacy occurred a few years before his death; and the spectacle of two infallible heads of the church anathematising one another, could not fail to open the eyes of Christendom to the unwarranted pretensions of both. To this circumstance, probably, Wickliffe was indebted for permission to end his turbulent life in peace, in his own parish, and in his own bed; since the disposition of Rome towards this arch-heretic was sufficiently testified, when, forty-one years afterwards, the council of Constance, in impotent rage, condemned his bones to be exhumed, burned, and cast into the brook. But the Swift (such is its name) bore them to the Avon, that to the Severn, the Severn to the sea, to be dispersed unto all lands; which things are an allegory.

Of this great reformer himself, who so raised the waters not of this country only, but of Europe at large, that Luther came in with the next wave, it is difficult to speak. A most effectual weapon he undoubtedly was for the pulling down of strong holds; but we may admire the wisdom of God in adjusting his instruments to the work which he has for them to do, when he raised up first a Wickliffe, and afterwards a Cranmer. Had they changed places, Cranmer’s meek and gentle spirit would have been overborne by the almost irresistible torrent of corruption of the times of Edward; and, on the other hand, Wickliffe’s daring and impetuous temper, and his hasty views of ecclesiastical polity, would have urged him to go all lengths with Henry—and whilst he would have demolished a church of Rome, he would have left few or no materials for erecting a church of England. Cranmer and his colleagues have been pronounced by our great puritan poet, “time serving and halting prelates;” happily, in one sense, they were so. Wickliffe would have been a man more after Milton’s heart; but “the wisdom which is from above,” we read, “is gentle:” and if there be one thing more than another that fixes the attention of sober-minded and considerate men when contemplating the progress of the Reformation, it is the calmness, the temper, the prudence, the presence of mind, with which Cranmer endeavoured to direct (like a good and guardian angel) the tempest on which he rode; and whilst he felt how much the fierce element was imperatively commissioned to destroy, he never for a moment forgot the still nobler part, how much it was permitted to spare: he steered the ark of his church with wonderful dexterity through a sea of troubles, avoiding the scattered Cyclades, when it is probable that, had his great predecessor been the pilot, he would have run it aground, and left it a wreck. Wickliffe, as a sincere believer, was naturally vexed at the scandals by which he saw Christ’s religion brought into contempt; as a secular churchman and a champion of the seculars, he hated the friars with a cordial hatred, and took pleasure in exposing their covetousness and frauds; as an academician, he could not tolerate their encroachments on the rights and privileges of the universities, and their surreptitious abduction of four fifths of the students;[163] as a man of learning, the first of his day, he would give no quarter to monastic ignorance; as a subject of the King of England, he would not allow of a divided allegiance in a church of England: but whilst he stood up the advocate of these principles, the impetuosity of his temper drove him on to extravagant lengths, and now exhibits him not so much in the light of a religious reformer as of a religious revolutionist. Perhaps he blinded himself to the necessary consequences of many of his own opinions, and, like Wesley, was carried further, both in himself and in his followers, than he at first meant to go: but assuredly in him, and still more in his school, may be traced the elements of a character destined afterwards to attain to an unequivocal eminence in our history, that of the puritan, and the various sects which, though not fully fledged till the civil wars, were tumbled forth like bats out of their hiding places at the first shock of the Reformation, owed their origin perhaps to this vigorous, sincere, but incautious antagonist of the church of Rome. When we see him opposing the doctrine of transubstantiation, that fruitful mother of mischief, howbeit wavering as it should seem, in his own mind between what was afterwards the “real presence” of Luther and the “spiritual presence” of Zuingle; denying the superiority of the church of Rome over other churches, and the power of the keys as pertaining to the pope rather than to any other priest, when we see him maintaining that the Gospel is alone, and of itself, a sufficient rule of faith and practice, and that all have a right to read it for themselves; that pilgrimages and indulgences are vain and unprofitable, the worship of saints unauthorised, and forced vows of celibacy unlawful; above all, when we find him proclaiming (though here he does not speak with the emphasis of Luther, who made this article the test of a standing or falling church,) that justification comes by faith in Christ alone;[164] we praise the man, for we find him labouring strictly in his vocation, purifying the Word of God from traditions and additions which had made it of none effect, and disabusing the people of dangerous and deadly errors. Nay, more, he might have gone further if he pleased; and however inexpedient it might be to enlarge upon the doctrine of Divine decrees—and of its inexpediency, we have an opinion—still there would have been no indication in this of his weapons being carnal, of his treasure (and great that treasure was) being contained in an earthen vessel; but rather an argument that he felt strongly the error of the church of Rome in attributing so much to man’s own powers, and that, impelled by such a feeling, he rushed into the opposite extreme, and refused to him such powers as were his due. But when he argues that the wickedness of the priest vitiates the acts of his ministry,[165] in contradiction, to the inference which may be fairly drawn from the text, where the people are declared to have “transgressed” because they despised the offering of the Lord, though the wickedness of Eli’s sons was the excuse,[166] and in contradiction to the express command of our Lord, that whatsoever the Scribes and Pharisees who sat in Moses’ seat bid men observe, they were to observe and do, though they were not to do after their works;[167] when he maintains tithes to be mere alms, and affirms that parishioners have a right to withhold them in case the minister provokes them so to do, of which they are to be themselves the judges;[168] and when he teaches, in the same spirit, that church endowments in perpetuity may be resumed under similar circumstances by the patron or the king,[169] thereby subverting the very principles upon which not only ecclesiastical property rests, but all property whatever, and annihilating an establishment at a blow; when his immediate disciples, such as William Thorpe and Lord Cobham, are found erecting themselves into inquisitors of the morals of the superior clergy, and denying them to be priests of God, whether archbishops or bishops, if their character, conversation, and conduct did not answer to a test of their own;[170] these dogmas when we read, it is difficult to separate the conscientious reformer from the exasperated antagonist, or to refrain exclaiming with St. Paul, “Are ye not carnal, and walk as men?” It may not be fair to impute to Wickliffe himself all the extravagances of his followers, yet they are very natural consequences of the principles he adopted and taught; in many cases they must have seen the light in Wickliffe’s own time; some of them undoubtedly attach to himself; and they are all, at any rate, remarkable as the first fruits of those opinions and practices which, when coupled with politics, some two centuries and a half later, overturned both altar and throne. We find the Lollard taking upon himself to pronounce on the call of his ecclesiastical ruler, and yielding or refusing him canonical obedience after a verdict of his own:[171] we find him traversing the country from town to town, preaching in churches and churchyards, in fairs and markets, by a self-constituted authority, without license had from the bishop, or regard paid to his inhibition or summons:[172] we find him stumbling at pontifical habits, and for himself going about in his blue or russet gown, and barefoot;[173] we find him strongly prejudiced against the use of church music and organs (which was evidently the feeling of Wickliffe himself),[174] and quoting Scripture in support of his prejudice in the very spirit of the days of Cromwell, as though Christ would not raise the damsel to life until he had first put forth the minstrels:[175] we find him holding up to the clergy the duty of copying St. Paul to the letter, and of labouring like him with their own hands for their own maintenance;[176] and we find him (a circumstance which is here mentioned not as a matter of charge, but as a matter of fact, illustrating his resemblance to the puritan) dealing in a phraseology of his own, expressive of the sect to which he belonged, and less loose and secular than was usual.[177] It was natural that a party now becoming numerous, having religion for their common bond (the strongest of all), and holding some tenets not altogether favourable to a monarchical government and an episcopal church, should be regarded with some suspicion. The sheriff’s oath, as it was framed by statutes of Richard II. and Henry IV., required of that officer to watch the Lollards; and the clause to this effect continued in force till the time of Charles I., when Sir Edward Coke, on being made sheriff of the county of Buckingham, objected to it, and it was in consequence withdrawn.[178] Mr. Hume, who is less sceptical in weighing the value of evidence when it tends to cast imputations on religious professors than on some other occasions, boldly pronounces Lord Cobham to have been guilty of high treason, (in spite of Fox’s express testimony to the contrary,) and the sect in general to have had treasonable designs;[179] but St. Paul himself was called a “mover of sedition,” though he actually preached that to “resist the power” was to “resist the ordinance of God.” The executions of the Lollards, which took place between Wickliffe’s death and the Reformation, appear to have been in reality on the charge of heresy, not of disaffection; though it is true that the latter accusation was put forward in one or two instances, as being the more popular charge, just as our Lord was accused of making himself a king, when a Roman tribunal could otherwise have seen no fault in him. Besides, the manner in which sentence was carried into effect—which was in all cases, we believe, by fire, the appropriate punishment of heresy—confirms this opinion. Still some of the principles of the Lollard were, doubtless, of a dangerous political character; in his hands they appear to have lain dormant; but when he lapsed into the puritan, the politician was combined in him, and then they became active and mischievous. If he ran into extremes, he had some cause and excuse for so doing; he, at least was not straining at gnats, but at camels. An unmitigated creed drove him into an unmeasured abomination of it; the personal corruption of the Roman catholic priest of those times, tempted him to question his official authority; his abuse of what was lawfully his own, to dispute his abstract right of it: but though in all this he might be mistaken, he was not mercenary; and whatever his opinions were, however untenable, he was true to them in life and in death, forfeiting for the sake of them his property, his liberty, and his peace, and often in the end sealing them with his blood. But, after all, the great glory of the Lollard was this, that he gave to the people the pure word of God. The work whereby Wickliffe hastened the Reformation, was his translation of the Scriptures into his own mother-tongue. Apart from this, his labours, as valuable as they were, might not be thought of unmixed value. Herein he had the sure promise of God pledged to his success. “For as the rain cometh down and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower and bread to the eater; so shall my word be, saith the Lord, that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.”[180] Void it did not return. Hitherto the Scriptures were little known. Cædmon, it is true, had paraphrased in verse detached portions of them in the seventh century. Bede, it has been before observed, had translated the Gospel of St. John. Translations of all the Gospels into Anglo-Saxon had been made between the reigns of Alfred and Harold. Elfric produced versions of many books of the Old Testament, as well as of the New; but, meanwhile the invasion of the Danes threw the kingdom into a frightful state of anarchy, and long kept it so disturbed. Then the Norman conquest succeeding again broke its spirit and changed its language; so that the word of God had become precious in the days of Wickliffe. The Anglo-Saxon which still continued to be the staple of the dialect of England, was by this time saturated with Norman words (no great number having been adopted into it since; and whilst Chaucer was labouring to fix the English tongue (its winged words) on principles of taste, amongst the courtiers and nobles, Wickliffe, perhaps even a more perfect master of it still, was establishing it yet more permanently, by knitting up in it the immortal hopes of the people at large, and stamping it in a complete translation of the Bible, with “holiness to the Lord.” At this day his version can scarcely be called obsolete. I speak of the New Testament, for the Old has never yet been printed; a reproach both upon the divines and the philologists of England, which, we trust, will speedily be removed. At this day, it might be read in our churches without the necessity of many even verbal alterations; and on comparing it with the authorised version of King James, it will be found that the latter was hammered on Wickliffe’s anvil. By this great and good work the pleasure of the Most High prospered in his hand. An eager appetite for Scriptural knowledge was excited among the people, which they would make any sacrifice and risk any danger to gratify. Entire copies of the Bible, when they could only be multiplied by means of amanuenses, were too costly to be within the reach of very many readers; but those who could not procure the “volume of the Book,” would give a load of hay for a few favourite chapters, and many such scraps were consumed upon the persons of the martyrs at the stake.[181] They would hide the forbidden treasure under the floors of their houses, and put their lives in peril, rather than forego the book they desired; they would sit up all night, their doors being shut for fear of surprise, reading or hearing others read the word of God; they would bury themselves in the woods, and there converse with it in solitude; they would tend their herds in the fields, and still steal an hour for drinking in the good tidings of great joy:—thus was the angel come down to trouble the water, and there was only wanted some providential crisis to put the nation into it, that it might be made whole.

CHAPTER VI.

LUTHER.—ERASMUS.—SIR T. MORE.—NEW TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE.—DEMAND FOR IT.

Such was the condition of England in the fifteenth century: the minds of men generally alienated from the church of Rome by reason of its corruption; their religious knowledge improved, and improving daily, by the wider diffusion of the Scriptures in the mother-tongue, to which the art of printing now so effectually contributed; and a sect, neither few in numbers, nor wanting in activity or courage, in the heart of the kingdom, ready to profit by any occasion which might offer of opening the eyes of their countrymen. Providence, having now sufficiently prepared the world for the reception of such a character, raised up a great reformer, whose labours, though immediately confined to Germany, still made themselves felt throughout Europe, and more especially in this island.

Martin Luther, the son of a working miner in Saxony, was born at Isleben on the 10th of November, 1483, a day much to be remembered. He was a man for the times; qualified by the force of his character for giving them a wrench. In his early years he took on himself the vows of an Augustin monk, and, to use his own words, was a “most mad Papist.” Various circumstances concurred to disabuse him of his bigotry; they have been severally advanced with more or less emphasis according to the respective views of the writers who have treated this subject—the secular historian tracing his conversion to secondary causes, the devout, ascribing it wholly to the grace of God. Both may be right; it was probably the effect of accident, of reflection, and of time, God working by means of such instruments. At the age of three and twenty the business of his monastery carried him to Rome. He saw there more than was expedient. He was surprised to find, on near inspection, that the image which he had been taught to believe fallen from Jupiter, wore many appearances of having been made by the craftsman. He was too sincere himself not to feel disgust at the symptoms of hollow faith which forced themselves upon his notice in the capital of Christendom and he returned to Saxony from his mission “with thoughts arising in his heart.” He betook himself to the study of the Scriptures, with Erasmus for his help; with whose system of interpretation, however, he does not seem to have been entirely satisfied. He felt an increasing dislike of the schoolmen and soon entertained a suspicion, which, by degrees, ripened into a conviction, of the truth of that doctrine which proved afterwards the burden of his preaching—justification by faith in Christ only.[182] Tetzel, a Dominican monk, was commissioned by the pope (Leo X.,) who wished to recruit his treasury, whether for the supply of his extravagance, or the erection of his church, or the prosecution of his war against the Turks, to put up his indulgences for sale in Germany. Tetzel executed his trust with the most shameless contempt of all decency. There was no sin, however monstrous (and some he named,) which he had not both the will and the power to remit. It was in vain for the German pastors to insist on penance; here was a papal missionary at hand ready to absolve from all pains and penalties. The indulgences were farmed; they were sold in the gross to the best bidders, and were by them dispersed amongst the retail pedlars of pardons, who resorted to the public houses, exhibited their wares, and picked the pockets of the credulous. Extravagance like this called up Luther, excited his honest indignation, and drove him to write. He had no notion where this first step was to lead him. In the simplicity of his heart he thought that the pope would be on his side, and condemn such flagrant excesses in his emissaries. Leo was as little aware as himself of the critical position of his affairs. “Brother Martin,” quoth he, “is a man of very fine genius;” and he regarded the whole matter as a battle of kites and crows. But Martin was in earnest, whatever Leo might be. Still he had little idea how much he would have to unlearn. He did not question, for instance, the pope’s supremacy, till Eckius, one of his indiscreet antagonists, provoked him to scrutinise the pretension, and then, like honest Latimer, he found himself hard to be persuaded that our Saviour said—“Peter, I do mean this by sitting in thy boat, that thou shalt go to Rome, and be bishop there five and twenty years after mine ascension, and all thy successors shall be rulers of the universal church after thee.”[183] On he went, feeling his way and light continued to break upon him. Two years later than the time when he wrote against indulgences (which was in 1517) he tells Spalatinus, the secretary of the Elector of Saxony, and his own confidential correspondent that he had no intention to separate from the apostolic see.[184] He examines the decretals; and then he whispers in his friend’s ear that he begins to suspect the pope to be antichrist. He ponders somewhat longer, and he now acquaints him that he has not much doubt of the fact;[185] and shortly after this (in 1520) he publishes his “Tract against the Popedom,” in which he draws the sword; and then his “Babylonish Captivity,” in which he throws away the scabbard. Measures are no longer kept by either party. On the 15th June, 1520, Leo issued his damnatory bull excommunicating Luther, delivering him over to Satan, requiring the secular princes to apprehend him, and condemning his books to be burned.[186] Luther, nothing dismayed, on the 10th December of the same year returns measure for measure, and raising a huge pile of wood without the walls of Wittenberg, commits decretals, canon law, and bull to the flames together.[187] Time was when this would have been frenzy; it was still perilous; but public opinion, which the art of printing had called into being, and which was now gathering strength, was with the reformer. The anathema was torn in pieces at Erfurt, and was ill received every where.[188] Politics again stood Luther’s friend. Frederick, the elector of Saxony, his cautious but constant protector, had laid the new emperor (Charles V.) under personal obligations, by declining the imperial crown for himself and transferring his interest to him;—here was a lion’s mouth stopped. Then Charles and Francis were rival monarchs, and in the midst of their rivalry, the Lutheran heresy (like the earthquake at Thrasymenæ, which rolled away unperceived by the combatants) did not rivet their exclusive attention amidst the intrigues of the cabinet, or the clashing of arms; and moreover the Lutheran party might be useful to either to turn a balance. Accordingly, Luther ventured to encounter the diet of Worms, and felt, what he exclaimed to the vast multitude who hailed him as he stepped out of his carriage, that “God was on his side.” He came out of that trial unharmed, however the smell of fire might have passed on him, and invested even with greater influence on public opinion than before. He found it necessary to submit to a friendly imprisonment in the castle of Wartburg, till the tyranny of the diet should be overpast; but he availed himself of this unacceptable leisure for the manufacture of his arms. On the one hand, he taught the people out of the Scriptures, giving them an admirable translation, first of the New, and then of the Old Testament, a translation which our own Cranmer kept ever by his side;[189] he laboured with still greater care his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, a work containing wholesome doctrine and most necessary for those times, when (as in the days of St. Paul) faith in Christ was overlaid by ritual observances, and merit was pleaded where mercy should have been craved. On the other hand, he did not scruple to wield more ignoble implements of war; if the sword was not at hand, he could smite with the ox-goad. Coarse and grotesque caricatures of his opponents in a frontispiece, often recommended his works to his plebeian readers; a cardinal decorated with a fox’s brush which he trailed through the mire, and with which he bespattered his neighbours; a pope seated astride upon a sow, or furnished with a pair of ass’s ears, whilst a legion of imps, busy like the Rosicrucian gnomes, on mischief, would be crowning him with a nauseous mitre, or lowering him into an infernal abyss or preparing faggots for his burning.[190] To these and the like weapons of warfare did this intrepid and unceremonious assailant descend, partly excused by the grosser taste of the times in which he lived, and partly by that disregard for petty proprieties, which is felt in a degree by most men of masculine minds, and which is felt by all men in moments of excitement and when the cause which they have at heart is at stake. Melancthon it is true, poured oil upon the waves, or, as Erasmus was pleased to express it walked after Luther, as Lite after Ate;[191] still the whole surface of society was troubled, and many who had once thought that a storm might clear the air, now heard the sound as of abundance of rain, with alarm, and girt up their mantles and ran before it. Erasmus, no doubt, was in this respect a type of many: he was in theory (at least in his earlier days) a reformer; he promoted the Reformation very essentially, and in a great variety of ways. The perspicuity and neatness of his style, the peculiar edge which he could put upon all his thoughts, the playfulness of his fancy, the copiousness of his knowledge, made him the most popular writer of the age. As a critic, he caused Scripture to be better known to scholars, by publishing the first printed edition of the Greek Testament: as a commentator he caused it to be better understood; though by some fatality, as Bishop Bull complains,[192] he is prone, like Grotius after him, to give certain important texts an Arian bias; the effect perhaps of a capricious temperament, since his writings in general furnish proof enough of his Trinitarian orthodoxy. Certainly we ourselves owe him a debt of gratitude for his paraphrase of the New Testament, a work which Cranmer introduced into all the parish churches in England, not indeed as faultless, but as the best he could find for that use, and done by “the most indifferent writer;”[193] and mutilated and moth-eaten copies of it are still occasionally to be seen chained to their desks. In his colloquies, too, of which the influence must have been very great, he lashes the abuses of the Roman Catholic church, and the monks, and friars above all, as the authors and abettors of those abuses, with a rod of nettles; and a system of things in which even the most sober thinker would see much to ridicule, found in Erasmus an assailant who could discover matter for merriment even in subjects the most grave. In truth, he had more wit than he could well manage; it is often ill-timed and ill-directed;[194] often he hits religion itself when he aims it at superstition only; and whilst he “shoots his random arrow o’er the house, he hurts a brother.”[195] It is possible to imagine that had an infidel age, instead of an age of sound religious inquiry, immediately succeeded the times of Erasmus, his levity would have frequently proved mischievous, and the blows which he had intended should tell against the church of Rome only, and which under Luther’s management did there spend themselves, would have been found misplaced, and apt to recoil. He was, perhaps, even more ambitious of reviving learning than religion; it was popish ignorance as much as popish heterodoxy that called him out. Literature was what he lived for. He could have wished that such a scholar as Melancthon, so splendidly endowed with talents for serving the cause of letters, had devoted himself to letters alone;[196] and when at last he was moved to take an active part against the Gospellers, as they were called, it seems to have been in some measure from a notion that the Reformation was absorbing every other question, and that in consequence of it the study of profane authors was unreasonably neglected.[197] Erasmus, however, as we have already hinted, was alarmed at the commotions which Luther’s innovations threatened. When the tug of war came, he showed that he had only been for a reformation on paper; he would detect abuses, but not correct them; he was desirous of the end, but afraid of the means; he was for the excision of the pound of flesh, but then it must be done without shedding one drop of blood. Sir Thomas More, though a person of much greater courage, both moral and physical, than Erasmus, herein partook of his feelings; he saw the evil, but could not see his way through it. His Utopia, written about the year 1513, when he was yet young, is the work of a man alive to the corruptions of a church of which he lived to be the champion, the inquisitor, and the martyr. He could then, through the medium of his ideal republic, and by the mouth of an imaginary speaker, pass censure upon the monks as the drones of society[198]—reduce the number of the priests to the number of the churches[199]—remove images[200]—advocate the right of private judgment[201]—exhort that the work of conversion should be done by persuasion, but not coercion, holding the faith of a man to be not always an affair of volition;[202] he could banish from his imaginary kingdom those who condemned all heretics to eternal torments as bigots,[203] and extend his principles of concession even far beyond those afterwards adopted by the author of the Liberty of Prophesying, and to a degree incompatible with the existence of any religious establishment whatever.[204] It is true, that a salvo is added in conclusion[205] (just as Erasmus would have added it under similar circumstances), that Sir Thomas More, for his part, thought much of this visionary; but if so, why agitate such questions and unsettle the minds of men to no purpose? Their author might indeed be disposed to shut his eyes when he pulled the trigger, but it is pretty clear that he aimed his piece at the church. But when that work was published, More little thought what he should live to witness, or that a Luther was nigh, even at the door—five years later, and probably Utopia would never have seen the light; for the chancellor was one of the first to take alarm at the progress of the Lutheran heresy, and to prophesy no smooth things concerning it.[206] He wrote against it, attacking Luther, Tindall, and Frith, with great acrimony, and opposing his “Supplication of the Souls in Purgatory,” to a very popular pamphlet by one Fish, published at that time, entitled “The Supplication of Beggars,” in which the latter complained that they were robbed of their rightful property in the people’s alms by the friars; and that whereas the Pope had it in his power to release souls from purgatory for nothing, he would only do it for money; nay, that when he might extinguish it altogether, by a general gaol-delivery of the spirits in prison, he still persisted in tolerating its continuance.[207] A memorable instance it is of the force of religious prejudice, that Sir T. More, placid and gentle as was his natural temper, and averse as he had once shown himself to persecution for matters of opinion, should, nevertheless, have hardened his heart against the reformers, and been more than consenting to the death of Bilney and of Bainham.[208] In this last case, indeed, he seems to have known no touch of pity; for in the hope of making his victim discover his books and impeach his acquaintance who were members of the Temple, he whipped him at a tree in his garden at Chelsea, called the “tree of troth,” and afterwards stood by when he was racked in the Tower. This is a sad falling off from the tolerant principles of his youth; but meanwhile many feverish years had passed over the head of Sir Thomas More, and inspired him with a dread of those who were given to change—the crisis which he had helped in a degree to call up, had come at the call, and the magician stood aghast at the potency of his own spell. We are unfair judges of the sentiments and conduct of men who lived upon the verge of the Reformation. We are born when order has arisen out of confusion, and a pure faith come forth from the refiner’s fire; but it must be confessed, that before the event it was impossible to calculate its probable consequences. This only was certain, that in number they must be very many, in magnitude very great; and well might a wise and thoughtful man, who stood upon the edge of that heaving sea of troubles, contemplate the scene before him with an eye of anxiety, of jealousy, and of fear for the issue. Indeed the Reformation was, as one might expect, the cause of the young; a circumstance of which Sir Thomas More does not fail to take advantage, when, in his controversy with Frith on the corporal presence, he always contemptuously speaks of him as “this young man.”[209] And in a curious interlude entitled “Lusty Juventus,” written on the side of the Reformation, we read (loquitur Diabolus)—[210]

“The old people would beleve stil in my lawes,

But the yonger sort lead them a contrary way;

They wyll not beleve, they playnly say,

In old traditions as made by men,

But they wyll ’leve as the Scripture teacheth them.”

There was too much hazard in it, and the sacrifice of too many early associations, principles, and prejudices, for gray hairs. Time, however, that gentle innovator, settled these differences. At the period when the papal power was put down in England, nearly twenty years had elapsed since Luther first took up his parable against papal abuses. In this interval, a generation of aged defenders of the ancient faith had been gathered to their fathers, and had given place to such as had grown up under the influence of a better star. The press had been active, of which the wonderful influence was first made known upon this great question. The pure doctrines and heroic deeds of the German reformers circulated throughout England. Luther was in every mouth—ballads sung of him. His writings, together with those of Huss, of Zuingle, and of many anonymous authors whom the times evoked, were clandestinely dispersed. Tracts, with popular titles, such as “A booke of the Olde God and New,” “The burying of the Masse;” “A, B, C, against the Clergy,” made their appeals to the people. The confessions of some of the more eminent Lollards, and expositions of particular chapters of Scripture, which were thought to militate the most strongly against the errors of Rome, were industriously scattered abroad. Above all, Tindall’s translation of the New Testament was now in the hands of many; for the price, as compared with that of Wickliffe’s a century before, was just forty-fold less[211]; and by means of it, the multitude were enabled to compare what the Gospel actually was, with what Rome had made it by traditions.[212] The art of printing in this age of the revival of the Gospel, answered in some measure to the miraculous gift of tongues in the age of its first publication. It was soon perceived, that if the pope did not put an end to the press, the press would put an end to the pope. Awkward attempts were made to defeat its labours. It was a new principle introduced into the social system, which in its application, after the experience of three centuries, is found to involve many difficulties, and with which, at that time of day, neither its friends nor its foes knew how to deal. Tonstall, bishop of London, a man of a very different spirit from his brutal successor Bonner, bought up all the copies of Tindall’s Translation, and burnt them up at Paul’s Cross:[213] a humane but useless measure; for it soon appeared, that unless he could buy up ink, paper, and types, he was only making himself Tindall’s best customer. Accordingly, a new edition speedily issued from the Antwerp press, in which former errors were corrected; and though one golden branch had been torn away, another, not of the same but of a better metal, succeeded it. The importation of these foreign wares was strictly forbidden; but there was a demand for them in the country, and they were smuggled notwithstanding. Proclamations were uttered against the possessors of all heretical writings, but they were set at nought.[214] Spies were encouraged; the husband tempted to betray the wife, the parent the child, and a man’s foes became literally those of his own household.[215] Nay, more, by a refinement in cruelty, the strongest instincts of nature were outraged, and a daughter was compelled to fire the fagots with her own hands, by which her father was to be burned.[216] But measures like these were only calculated to defeat the object which they were intended to promote.

Strong public feeling, when matured in its growth and righteous in its principle, cannot be effectually suppressed—check it, and it rages impatiently; whilst, if its fair course be not hindered, it may only make sweet music.

CHAPTER VII.

CRANMER.—THE DIVORCE.—THE SUPREMACY.