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á traffic (however confined to a privileged order) was to make the article itself looked upon in the light of merchandise, and to invite towards it the itching palms of the profane. And even now, amongst other advantages not, to be sure, unalloyed, which the law against simony in some degree secures, such as the less frequent purchase of livings at high prices, for which interest of money would be sought by an exaction of dues to the uttermost farthing, to the sure destruction of the pastoral character,—such as the better chance hereby offered to meritorious men without influence, of finding a patron when the temptation he would be otherwise under to sell rather than give, is partly taken out of his way;-besides these advantages there is another, and not the least, in the skreen which it interposes between the church and the market, and the total confusion which it prevents between the things of men and the things of God.

Henry proved himself an apt scholar in the lessons which the incautious, not to say unlawful, practice of the church of Rome taught him. And so successfully had he overcome all primitive notions of the honour due to sacred things, that even before the dissolution, he seems to have converted many monasteries into stables; a scandal of which honest Latimer did not fail to remind him publicly; conceiving it a monstrous thing, that "abbeys, which were ordained for the comfort of the poor," should be kept for the king's horses; nor convinced of the contrary by the nobleman (who seems to have been ripe to become an impropriator, as very likely he did) who said to him, "What hast thou to do with the

king's horses?-horses be the maintenance and part of a king's honour and also of his realm; wherefore, in speaking against them, ye are speaking against the king's honour."1

Cranmer was not (as may be well believed) an unconcerned spectator of this great revolution in the possessions of the church; but though he agreed with Cromwell in the desire of the dissolution, he differed from him with regard to the application of the proceeds. Indeed, the views they respectively took of the nature of ecclesiastical property do not appear to have coincided. The one was rather acting in a political, the other in a religious spirit. Cromwell was concerned to right the monarchy, Cranmer to save a church. The former was for the suppression of the religious houses, because the supremacy of the crown could not be otherwise secured; the latter had this for his object too, but still more the annihilation of the abuses of purgatory, masses for the dead, saint-worship, and pilgrimage, of all which the abbeys were the incorrigible patrons. So far, therefore, they went hand in hand. But in the disposal of the vast fund which accrued from the confiscation of the church estates, Cranmer did not, like Cromwell and the parliament, regard it as a matter for the king to take his pastime with, according to his own mere will and motion.2 Nor would he 1 Latimer's Sermons, v. i. p. 87.

2 See some curious traits of Cromwell's real character collected from his own memoranda, and other authentic sources, in Ellis's Original Letters, vol. ii. p. 116. second series, and again, p. 162.: a list of the grants of lands made to him by Henry, is given p. 171. See also HalJam's Constitutional History, 8vo. i. 96.; and Sir James Mackintosh's History of England, ii. 228.

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dissipate, nor did he think it lawful to divert from its original destination, and that the promotion of God's glory, so ample a revenue, and make it over at once, and for secular purposes. only, to the crown. He, therefore, was for considering it as still a sacred treasure, to be applied to sacred ends; and out of the old and corrupted monasteries he was desirous to see arise new and better foundations: houses attached to all the cathedrals, to serve as nurseries for the clergy of the diocese in religion and learning; an addition made to the incomes of the inferior class1; and the number of sees increased, with a corresponding diminution in their extent, that the bishop might be in deed as well as in name the overseer.2 To these wise and good propositions Latimer added another, no less commendable, that a few of the greater abbeys should be left for pious and charitable uses. For the priory of Malvern, above all, he intercedes with great earnestness; not that it "should stand in monkery, but so as to be converted to preaching, study, and prayer; and then he adds, "Alas! my good Lord" (it is to Cromwell that he makes his fruitless appeal), "shall we not see two or three in every shire changed to such remedy?"3 In suggesting these and similar measures, the Reformers felt that they had right on their side. Whether the property of the church had not accumulated to an amount inconvenient to the state, as unduly narrowing the limits within which other professions were left to walk, may be doubted; and therefore Cranmer, with his usual moderation, 1 Burnet, ii. 45, 46. 2 Id. i. 189, 190. 3 Id. i. 227.

consented that the king should resume the lands which the piety (or, as it would be now said, the superstition,) of his ancestors had granted to ecclesiastics, and dispose of them as seemed best to him. But they felt also, that church endowments in general, and tithes in particular, were goods set apart for the promotion of religion from time immemorial, the possessor of a manor erecting upon it a church, and charging it for ever with the maintenance of a man whose business it should be to teach the people upon it the law of God, and thus acknowledging on his own part his tenure to be under God, "the land His, and himself a stranger and sojourner with Him.”1 This was the origin of parishes; the parish coextensive (as it is still almost always found) with the manor, so that even where the latter chances to have a part distant and detached, the parish, however inconvenient it may be for pastoral superintendence and instruction, usually claims it too. The fulfilment of the conditions annexed to these grants, it was only equitable that the donor and his heirs should exact and regulate; they were the natural guardians of the charities; and when the lapse of years, the course of events, and public convenience, had caused this guardianship to devolve upon the state, the state, like any other guardian, had a right to superintend the trust so as to carry into effect the designs of the donor, but no right whatever to alienate it, apply it to purposes of its own, and thereby frustrate those intentions. It had a right, for instance, to provide the best religious instruction which was

1 Levit. xxv. 23.

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to be had, even though it was such as the benefactor had not contemplated; and to exclude such as was found, on a more intimate knowledge of the subject, to be erroneous, even though it was such as the benefactor had sanctioned; it being obvious that his intention was to guide, not to mislead, those for whom he had shown so lively an interest; but it had no right to withhold all religious instruction whatever, dispose of the trust to the best bidder, and putting the produce in its pocket, say that it was corban. If a professorship of astronomy had been founded by some lover of the science when the system of Ptolemy was in the ascendant, surely the trustees of his foundation would be thought to satisfy his manes best by giving it to a man who would now show his pupils a more excellent way, and that Newton was right and Ptolemy wrong, though contrary to the ill-informed notions of the founder himself, and though he, like the Jesuits1, would possibly have denounced the innovation as heretical; but they would not be thought to execute their trust to his satisfaction or to their own credit, if they voted astronomy in general to be mere moonshine, and spent the fund that was set apart for its encouragement in an annual dinner. Yet this is the doctrine with regard to the responsibility of the state for the due preservation of the church establishment which is often in these days preached, as though the state were owners of church property instead of its trustees, and it was lawful for the state to do

1 See the characteristic declaration prefixed to the third volume of the Jesuits' edition of Newton's Principia.