rather for the fees than for the faith. Thus did the establishment suffer both from within and from without: from within, by the decay of all discipline; from without, by the forfeiture of all respect. Nor was this all. Nothing contributes so much to disgust the public mind with the existing order of things as the faulty administration of justice. Let the people have justice purely, unexpensively, and expeditiously administered, and what chiefly concerns them in the government of a country is obtained. "I crave the law," is the demand of any stout-hearted nation, and having gained this object, they are at peace. Now the ancient county-court was simple and satisfactory in its practice, — it was the natural growth of the soil; suited to the wants of Englishmen, and consecrated by immemorial usage. The judiciary system introduced by the pope, on the other hand, into the diocesan courts, of which rescripts from Rome and (subsequently when the books of the civil law had been discovered) the old Roman jurisprudence were the basis, was tedious, costly, and, what was perhaps worse than all, novel.2 Even of those who had to administer it, there were some who did it reluctantly, strove to evade it, and adopted the trial by jury instead of the subtleties of the Roman law; but these innovations were accounted heretical, and prohibitions were issued against Grosthead, Bishop of Lincoln, and others, who had the courage or temerity to attempt them. Still it was one thing 1 Reynolds, 41. 48, 49. 2 Reynolds, 36. LEGAL ABUSES. 57 to silence, and another to satisfy. Much inconvenience was felt by the people in consequence of "the law's delay," and a proportionate desire was created for a reformation of the system. The rolls of parliament, from Edward III. to Henry VIII., present numerous complaints to the Commons on the difficulties attending the probate of wills; and such there well might be, when, in addition to the parties already mentioned, the bishop and the legate, each of whom asserted his own exclusive right of probate, and referred his cause to the pope, a third party stepped in, under the title of legatus e latere, or special legate, who, in his turn, contested the privileges of the legatus natus, and urged his own superior claim to the cognisance of all testamentary matters.1 were the grievances touching property more onerous than those which regarded domestic relationship. The regulations of marriage were intricate and vexatious: whilst it was maintained to be in itself a sacrament, and so indissoluble, the prohibited degrees were studiously multiplied, and thereby a pretence was furnished for a dissolution whenever it should be the pope's pleasure to pronounce it. Thus did he hold in his hands, and determine by his legate, or by the dean of the arches, the legate's deputy, the legitimacy of children, and the succession of families; separating those whom no man had a right to put asunder, and giving his sanction to unions which nature and Scripture forbade. Nor The progress of a cause, slow, of necessity by 1 Reynolds, 68. reason of the forms of the court, and the contradictions of the canons, was still further and more seriously impeded by appeals. By these, episcopal decisions were set at nought; and the more effectually as the court of the arches was invested with the power of suspending the process of the ordinary till the pope's answer should be received, and often, no doubt, till one or both of the litigants would be ready to exclaim with King Henry, whose divorce presents, in its seven years' details, a splendid example of the grievances under which numbers of his subjects were suffering, with more right on their side, "I abhor This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome." It would be a long labour, and one, perhaps, of no great interest to the majority of our readers after all, to follow out this branch of our subject in all its extent. Suffice it, however, not to have passed over in silence so fruitful a source of popular discontent as abuses in the administration of the law-abuses which could not fail of alienating multitudes from a church with which they were identified. It is not, perhaps, a circumstance less worthy of notice from being often overlooked; and whilst the more obvious evils which clamorously demanded redress are set forth to the full, one which touched men in their property, their affections,- which met them in the affairs of" this working-day world" at every turn, is noticed casually, or not at all. There may be those, indeed, who think that to dwell at so much length on the secondary and EFFECTS OF ABUSES. 59 more disgraceful causes of the Reformation, is to detract from the character of that great event, and to tarnish its lustre; but they who regard God's enemies as his instruments will not so account of it. They will see in the course given to those beggarly elements the same superintending hand that wrought the nourishment of Jacob's household out of the sin of Jacob's sons; so that whilst they wickedly sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites, God mercifully made it for good; sending him before them, by this means, to preserve them a posterity in the earth, and to save their lives by a great deliverance. They will see in it the same power at work that shaped the cruel decree of Pharaoh for the children to be cast into the river, into an easy provision for bringing up Moses in the royal household, and thus fitting him to be the teacher and leader of Israel, by introducing him into all the wisdom of the Egyptians. They will see in it the same that achieved the salvation of the world itself, by Caiaphas who declared that it was expedient for one man to die for the people, and by the wretches that cried, "Crucify him! crucify him!" CHAPTER IV. MONASTERIES.THEIR USURPATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE CLERGY. IMPROPRIATIONS. EVILS OF THE SYSTEM. WITH the causes already enumerated as those which worked the downfall of the Roman Catholic church, there conspired the ignorance and immoral lives of the clergy. A system of celibacy upon compulsion was sure to produce a system of profligacy. Yet the disgusting catalogue of offences alleged against the regulars, by the visiters of the monasteries, ought, perhaps, to be received with some caution. The commissioners were not unprejudiced judges. They knew full well, that the king, their master, was determined on the dissolution of the religious houses, and that, at all events, a quarrel was to be picked. Bad enough those houses probably were, but had they been better, their doom was sealed. The preamble of the act for dissolving the smaller ones on pretence of their corruption, proclaims that the greater were spared as being regular, devout, and praiseworthy; yet we know what followed. The nunnery of Godstow, in Oxfordshire, was actually 1 27 Hen. 8. c. 28. Stat. of the Realm, iii. 576. |