II. BOOK be made subject to one great religious imperator; and cardinals, prelates, councils and priests should become the governors and legislators of mankind, instead of kings, peers, parliaments and knights, a golden age of piety and virtue would return, and the grand aspirations of mortal hope, and of our impatient speculations would speedily be realized. But the Age of Gold was the age of simplicity, not of luxury-of cottages and rural plains, not of palaces and metropolitan cities- of flocks and herds, not of armies, retinues and states-of honey, milk, and crystal streams, not of crowded tables, scientific cookery or gorgeous banquets. The members of the existing hierarchy, in their use of the wealth and power they had attained, manifested what they would be if they could monopolize them more largely; and therefore all suppositions that the morality or intellect of the world would prosper under their monarchy, was an unwarranted dream of selfflattering enthusiasm. Wolsey was the last church dignitary, of the antient system, who exemplified to the dullest mind in England the corruptions and evils of the pope's permitted supremacy. By obtaining the Legantine authority, he possessed the full papal power in his own country, and he used it as it was used elsewhere. His oppressions and peculations by it were made leading articles of his impeachment; but he pre 92 92 The charges were, that under this legantine power he had usurped on the jurisdiction of all the bishops; had given away the benefices of both spiritual and temporal patrons; had extorted money from religious houses by his visitations, and for making abbots and friars; had taken as legal to his own use, the property of spiritual persons who died, from their executors; had compelled all the English prelates to make him every year a pecuniary compensation, under the threat of usurping the cluded all punishment by two irresistible answers. The king and parliament had consented to his taking the dignity of legate a latere from the pope; and he had not exceeded the papal privileges and exercised rights. His offensive exertion of them against the established church of this country reconciled its prelates to the abolition of that supremacy, which was principally applied to pecuniary extortions. We can hardly take a safer guide to the feelings of the English hierarchy of that day, as to the papal oppressions and usurpations, than the too celebrated Bonner, who became under Mary their most remorseless champion. Yet he declared that the pope exercised in Englandan atrocious and bitter tyranny, and while he was called a servant of servants, was but a rapacious wolf in the clothing of a sheep." Bonner's phrase is severe, but does not go beyond the declared experience of the mild and cautious Erasmus.4 That neither time nor criticism, nor the general reprobation of society, could extinguish the immoralities which disgraced the antient 993 half or the whole of their jurisdiction, so that there was not a poor archdeacon but paid him yearly a portion of his living; and had visited most of the religious houses and colleges, and taken away a part of their livelihood. Articles of Imp. Hist. Herb.; Coke 4 Inst. 89; Parl. Hist. 42–51. 93 It is in his preface, when archdeacon of Leicester, and the English ambassador at Denmark, to the book of Gardiner, a congenial spirit both then and afterwards, against the pope, that he has inserted these sentiments. He says, the pontiff could no more tyrannidem, olim heu! nimirum truculentam et acerbam, exercere' in England; 'Interim etiam dum Lupus rapax ovis vestimento palliatus servorum servum appellabat, to the great detriment of the Christian republic.' Browne's Fascicul. p. 801. 94 He says, 'He presses me to say, if I ever saw a pirate made a bishop at Rome. I omit what I may have seen. But he will not deny, that sometimes there are promoted to the highest dignities, if not pirates, "et murderers, poisoners, simoniacal persons, and those who are familiar with vices that are not here to be named.' Er. Op. t. 9. c. 1180. CHAP. II. BOOK II. Catholic clergy, we learn from the state sermons before the council of Trent, in which they are repeatedly alluded to." 95 Thus, in 1545, the bishop of Bitunt exclaimed to the council, With what monstrous turpitudes, with what sordid pollution, with what a pestilence, are not both the priest and the people in the church defiled and corrupted! I put it to your judgment, fathers! and begin with the sanctuary itself, if any shame remains any modesty-any hope or reason of living well!-If there be not libido effrenata et indomita; audacia singularis-wickedness incredible! The two leeches, cupidity and ambition, are always crying out bring, bring.' Hence piety is turned into fucum and hypocrisy; and preaching into contention and pride, into a turpissimum mercatum. Hence the sheep scatter and wander; hence religion declines into superstition, faith to infidelity; and all exclaim that there is no God.' Plat's Monum. Con. Trid. 1. p. 16. In the same year, Ant. Marinarius, the Carmelite, in his oration at the same council, described some prelates as sleeping, or acting the part of mercenaries, not to say worse; many doctors teaching piety with their mouths, and impiety by their actions; professing a perfection of life, and disturbing all things by their scandalous examples; the face of the church dishonored by the corrupt manners of the age. Ib. p. 30. In the next year the bishop of St. Mark thus harangued the council: Look at Rome, which ought to be a shining luminary in the midst of the nations; Look at Italy, France and Spain; you will find no degree, age or sex, which is not corruption; labefactum; putre. No Scythians or Africans live more impurely or flagitiously. O Prelates! cities placed on mountains, we murder the sheep of the Lord by our example. Looking at our manners and life, they plunge with us into these whirlpools. We cannot restore the edifice which has fallen by our wickedness, but by probity, humility, poverty and charity.' Ib. p. 34. In 1546 the Jesuit Alphonso Salmero urged the same topic. Proh dolor! How great and how deplorable an evil is it, when the pastor makes the Prince of Darkness his leader. To be ignorant of the Divine Scriptures to be ashamed of the office of preaching the Gospel, as a contemptible thing-to regard mercenary gains to be devoted to luxury-to swell at praise. 99. The tempter suggests an insatiable appetite for domination when he leads to crave higher seats, fatter benefices, loftier dignities in the church.' 100. Pastors err when they convert their power into tyranny; who prefer to be, I will not say the shearers, but the devourers of their sheep. Hence those complaints of the people, (I wish they were untrue) that they are oppressed with burthens, robbed of their property, afflicted in their hearts, and tormented, from want of the divine word.' He then notices the pastors, who do not watch their flock; who indulge themselves; who seek with great diligence to dress their body, to fill their bellies, to increase their revenues, and to have splendid furniture, and the favor of princes. 101. CHAP. III. PROGRESS OF THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND III. THE Successive criticisms which have been noticed CHAP. on the Roman Catholic church, were too generally verified by daily experience, to be read and circulated without raising an increasing desire for the correction of the abuses, which were every where as visible as they were offensive. The objectionable evils could neither be justified nor denied: yet the different classes of the population, both in England and Europe, were not equally moved by their religious feelings, to require an alteration of what they censured. Worldly motives actuated the larger part of those, who pressed for emendatory changes in the ecclesiastical communities; and the reformation that was called for, could not be effected without worldly weapons and instruments, and by a very complicated and contested process. It was not the mere correction of vitious manners, which moralists might enforce, nor of articles of faith, which the wisest divines could elucidate. It involved the more difficult questions, of invading vested property; of abstracting possessed power; of annulling antient privileges, and of changing rites of worship and practices of religion, which had become wedded to the most rooted prejudices, and dear to the fondest hopes and best sensibilities of all orders of the public. Nor BOOK II. did the main subjects that were agitated in the great discussions which ensued, equally affect the interests or passions of all. A great diversity of views and motives, put different portions of the community into action; and this variety of objects and the frequent intermixture of private selfishness with public benefits, delayed the progress of the Reformation in some places, prevented it in others, and made it everywhere an angry and a combated transaction. It became in each country a political perturbation as well as a grand religious improvement. Its various branches may be thus distinguished: I. The diminution of the church property, and the violent transfer of it from its ecclesiastical professors to the lay nobility and gentry of the kingdom, had become the steady and rapacious object of many or most of the higher orders of the nation, from the time that the wealth of the religious bodies became prominent to the national eye.' Altho their possessions, if they had been equally divided and impartially distributed, would not perhaps have excited either covetousness or envy, yet some benefices, abbacies, preferments and prelacies, were so exuberautly affluent in their revenues, and their possessors, from the natural effect of worldly abundance, became so fond of using and displaying their wealth, in imitation and emulation of the secular nobles, that the mind of the laity was provoked to inquire, if their riches were not only unnecessary to their religious duties, but also incompatible with the performance of them. |