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went out to perform the same course of duty. The means of instruction were few and precarious under such a system, and those lords who were desirous of having spiritual aid always at hand for themselves, or who saw the advantage of having their vassals trained in a faith which inculcated obedience, industry, patience and contentment, built churches and endowed them for the maintenance of a resident priest. The bishops promoted such establishments: parishes were thus formed which were usually co-extensive with the domain of the patron, and as these became general, the system of itinerancy fell into disuse. The alteration was well intended, and has produced great good; yet it may have contributed in no slight degree to that decay of knowledge and dissoluteness of life which are known after this time to have ensued among the Saxon clergy. They were removed from the eye of authority, from the opportunities of learning, and from the society of their equals.

The Norman conquest produced more good than evil by bringing our Church into a closer connexion with Rome, for the light of the world was there,— dim indeed and offuscated, untrimmed and wavering in the socket, but living and burning still. A fairer ideal of Utopian policy can scarcely be contemplated than the papal scheme, if it could be regarded apart from the abuses, the frauds, and the crimes to which it has given birth. An empire was to be erected, not of force but of intellect, which should bind together all nations in the unity of faith, and in the bond of peace. Its members were to direct the councils of princes and the consciences of all men; for this purpose they were chosen from the rest of mankind in early youth, and trained accordingly, or they volunteered in maturer life, when weaned from the world and weary of its vanities. They were reliev ed by a liberal provision from any care for their own support; the obligation of celibacy precluded those prudential anxieties which might otherwise have employed too large a portion of their time and of their

thoughts, or have interfered in any way with that service to which they were devoted; and they were exempted from the secular power, that they might discharge their religious duty freely and without fear. By the wise and admirable institution of tythes, a tenth part of all property was rescued from the ordinary course of descent in which it would else have been absorbed, and formed into an ample establishment for the members of this intellectual aristocracy, in their different degrees. He who entered the church, possessing the requisite knowledge, ability, and discretion, however humble his birth, might aspire to wealth, rank, and honours which would make the haughtiest barons acknowledge him for their peer, and to authority before which kings trembled, and against which emperors struggled in vain.

Let us confess that human ambition never proposéd to itself a grander aim, and that all other schemes of empire for which mankind have bled, appear mean and contemptible, when compared to this magnificent conception. And much was accomplished for which all succeeding ages have reason to be grateful. For by their union with Rome (and that union could only be preserved by their dependence) the distant churches were saved from sinking into a state of utter ignorance and degradation, like that of the Abys sinians or Armenians; Christendom, because of this union, was more than a name; and therefore, notwithstanding its internal divisions and dissentions, on the great occasion when its vital interests were at stake, felt that it had one heart, one life, and acted with one impulse. Had it not been for the crusades, Mahommedanism would have barbarized the world. And had it not been for the elevation of the clerical character, Christendom itself would have continued in a state of barbarism, and even retrograded further; for birth would have been the only distinction, and arms the only honourable pursuit.

The Church could not have effected all this good, if it had not employed means which have been too indiscriminately condemned. A religion of rites and

ceremonies was as necessary for the rude and ferocious nations which overthrew the Roman empire, as for the Israelites when they were brought out of Egypt. Pomp, and wealth, and authority were essential for its success. Through these it triumphed, but by these it was corrupted; for they brought it into too close an union with the world. These temptations drew into its ranks men who disgraced by their vices the high offices which they obtained by their birth. The celibacy of the clergy was another cause of corruption. When the persecution under the heathen emperors was to be braved, or the preachers of the gospel were to expose themselves to the caprice and cruelty of barbarous idolaters, it was desirable that they should hold their lives loose, and, as far as possible, keep themselves disengaged from earth. But the imposition of celibacy upon all the ministers of the Church, was unauthorized by the letter of Scripture, and contrary to its spirit, and in its general consequences beyond all doubt detrimental to public morals. By a system of confession, favourable indeed to its ambitious views, but still more injurious to* morality, the Church intruded upon the sacredness of private life. It disguised the sublime and salutary truths of revelation beneath a mass of fables more gross and monstrous than the very Heathens had feigned; and arrogating to itself the power of forgiving sins, it substituted, in the place of Christian duties, a routine of practices borrowed from the Manichæans, Pagans of every kind, and even the Mahommedans; and established it as af

* La nature avoit posé deux barrières, pour maintenir la chasteté chez les femmes, la pudeur, et les remords: le prêtre les anéantit les toutes les deux, par la confession et l'absolution. (Maranda, Tableau du Piemont.) St. Evremond observes, that the Protestant religion is as favourable to husbands, as the Catholic is to what he calls lovers.

"Learn," says Bishop Burnet, "to view Popery in 'a true light, as a conspiracy to exalt the power of the clergy, even by subjecting the most sacred truths of religion to contrivances for raising their authority, and by offering to the world another method of being saved, besides that presented in the Gospel. Po

principle, that by these worthless works a man might not only secure salvation for himself, but accumulate a stock of surplus merits, which were disposable by gift or sale. Men were easily persuaded, that as the merit of good works might be bought, so might the account for evil ones be settled by pecuniary payment, and the rich be their own redeemers. Every thing on earth had long been venal, and the scheme of corruption was completed, by putting the kingdom of heaven at a price. Yet was this whole system well adapted to the ignorance upon which it rested, and which it tended to perpetuate. Its symbols were every where before the eyes of the people, and its practices dexterously interwoven with the daily business of life. While it lulled the conscience, it possessed the imagination and the heart.

The

Church was like a garden, in which things rank and gross in nature were running to seed; but they did not possess it wholly; it still produced beautiful flowers, and wholesome herbs and fruit.

When the abuses were most flagrant, and a spirit of inquiry had arisen with the restoration of letters, wise men would have weeded the garden, but rash ones were for going to work with the plough and the harrow. What was to be expected from the spirit which had gone abroad had been shown by the conduct of the Lollards in England, and more manifestly in Bohemia, by the bloody drama of the Hussite war. The most sagacious and even-minded men of the age, such as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, in their fear of religious revolution, and the inevitable evils which it would draw on, opposed the reform, which, but for that foresight, they would have desired and promoted. In this country the best people and the worst combined in bringing about the Reformation,

pery is a mass of impostures, supported by men who manage them with great advantages, and impose them with inexpressible severities on those who dare call any thing in question that they dictate to them."

and in its progress it bore evident marks of both. The business of demolition was successfully carried on by zealots, who lent their ignorant hands to aggrandize and enrich the rapacious and the * unprincipled; but the fathers 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 ustic e 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 poverty 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 enriched themselves by sacrilege supported the new establishment,

*The untimely end of that good prince, King Edward," says Burnet in the supplementary volume to his history, (p. 216.) was looked upon by all people as a just judgment 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 af ter 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."

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