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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

had

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

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

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

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

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

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