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not informed, together with other sects, some of native, some of exotic growth, but all combining a little sedition with not a little conceit.

Here, then, were the beginnings of sorrows laid up in store for the hapless Charles, and the church of which he was the head, and, in his later and more sobered years, the ornament. Now was the nation fly-blown; and it was only wanted that the days should be fulfilled when the hornets would take wing, and sting it into madness. So true it is that the sin of a government, like that of an individual, does eventually find it out. Long it may tarry before it manifests itself in its effects, but a century in the life of a nation is but a span; and he who destroyed the Amalekites in the time of Saul for the transgression of the Amalekites in the time of Moses, suffering his wrath to sleep four hundred years, and then to burst out, is still the God of the nations, and deals with them still after the same fashion, though the natural consequences of the offence may serve Him for the ministers of his tardy vengeance. For what had the church under its new discipline and organisation to oppose to these restless and inquisitive spirits? Could it not meet the evil, and extinguish it, whilst it was yet done in the green tree? Alas! its clergy were unfit for so delicate and difficult a work. The Reformation, owing to the violence which had attended and disgraced a noble cause, had depressed them as a body: doubtless there were of their number many most able men; none greater than some of them have been since born of woman; but with the generality it was very far otherwise. The impropriation system

The universities

now began to tell its tale. and schools had been comparatively deserted. It was with extreme difficulty that men could now be found to preach at Paul's Cross, once the object of so much clerical ambition. About the year 1544, Bonner writes to Parker, then master of Corpus, importuning him to send him help from Cambridge, and expressing his surprise that candidates should be lacking for such an office." I think there be at this day," says Latimer, in the middle of Edward VI.'s reign, "ten thousand students less than were within these twenty years." 2 The clerical profession no longer held out the same inducements to men of liberal acquirements and liberal minds to enter it. A very considerable proportion of the parishes of England were served by priests utterly ignorant and unlettered. The patrons had given their benefices to their menials as wages; to their gardeners, to the keepers of their hawks and hounds, these were the incumbents 3; or else, they had let in fee both glebe and parsonage, so that whoever was presented would have neither roof to dwell under nor land to live upon; but too happy if his vicarial tithes afforded him a chamber at an alehouse, and the worshipful society of the dicers and drinkers who frequented it ; nay, perhaps himself the landlord. 5 The questions addressed by Bishop Hooper to his clergy on his primary visitation are but too

1 Strype's Life of Parker, p. 17. fol. ed.

2 Latimer's Sermons, i. 246.

s Id. i. 266.

4 Id. i. 183. See also the lxxvth Canon.
5 Id. ii. 58.

DEPRESSION OF THE CLERGY.

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sadly characteristic of the condition of these shepherds of the people: "How many commandments? Where written? Can you say them by heart? What are the articles of the Christian faith? Can you repeat them? Can you recite the Lord's Prayer? How do you know it to be the Lord's Prayer?" Were these the men to uphold church and state, and in critical times too? or rather were they not the men to render both contemptible in any times?

The rising party of the Puritans, an active minority, busy rather than powerful in the Scriptures, given to subtle and unprofitable questions, would scoff at such preachers, and teach their hearers to scoff at them too; and this they not only could do, but did; and with the more mischievous effect, because (as it has been already said) the districts best peopled and most intelligent, the towns, were precisely the very poorest livings in the kingdom, and were, therefore, the very worst supplied with ministers 2; if, indeed, they were supplied at all, and not rather abandoned to whatever wolf might feel disposed to make the fold his prey, the laity themselves actually left to bury their own dead.3 The deep and lasting wound which such a clergy inflicted upon the character and credit of the church is scarcely to be described. It had not recovered itself in the days of Herbert, who was thought by his worldly-minded friends "to have lost himself in an humble way" when he took orders; and who himself (which is more to the purpose), unam1 Strype's Cranmer, p. 216.

2 Latimer, i. 93.

3 See Bishop Jewel's Sermon on Haggai, i. 2. near

the end.

M

bitious of distinction as he was become, casually speaks of his profession in his "Country Parson as one of general ignominy. It required the Augustan age of our divines, the age of a Hall, an Andrews, a Hammond, a Sanderson, a Taylor, a Barrow, a South, to interpose itself, in order that public opinion, viewing the Church of England through such a medium, might be compelled to do it tardy justice, and at length to reverence an establishment which had given birth to so much piety, so much learning, so much genius, so much wisdom, and so much wit.

Nor was it merely the ignorance of churchmen that gave the rising sectaries such advantage; there was treachery in the camp. Many of the old clergy, conforming to the innovations that had been made, (indeed, during Henry's reign, those in doctrine were not very considerable,) still occupied the pulpits, but without any love for their present position. On the contrary, it was naturally not unpleasant to them to see the elements of discord let loose, and like the "anarch old," to watch the strife in silence, by which they might themselves hope in the end again to reign. Homilies were provided, that sound, and at any rate harmless, doctrine might be propounded to the people. They were, however, often but "homely handled," to speak in Latimer's vein 2; for if "the priest were naught, he would so hack and chop them, that it was as good for his hearers to be without them for any word that should be understood." Neither were these Country Parson, p. 95.

1 Eccles. Biography, iv. 508. 12mo. ch. xxviii.

2 Latimer's Sermons, i. 105.

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conformists the most intelligent of the Roman Catholic teachers; on the contrary, they were in general of the mendicant orders, their recommendation being that they would work cheap, and spare the pocket of the patron. Neither were they the most reputable; for, as a further proof of the honest motives which had actuated many in their spoliation of the church, the very men who had been denounced as unfit to live whilst they were monks, were now inducted into benefices and stalls by the parties to whom the spiritual welfare of the people, forsooth, had been so dear an object, in order that they might be thus relieved from the payment of the pitiful pension with which their property was charged for their support.1

These are miserable and disgusting details; but if they are so to write and read, what must they have been to Cranmer and his colleagues to witness! How must their righteous souls have been vexed! Those persons who give to our reformers credit for the courage which they displayed in the flames, and regard their sufferings as confined to their martyrdom, do them poor justice. To jostle with so many offensive obstacles for so many long years; to persevere unto the end in the midst of so much to thwart, to disappoint, to irritate; to feel themselves earnest, sincere, and single-hearted, and to have to encounter so much hypocrisy, double-dealing, and pretence; to work their weary way through a sordid and mercenary generation, who had a zeal for God's service on their tongues, but who in

1 Burnet, Pref. ii. 14. Strype's Cranmer, p. 36.

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