BOOK I. revenues of their order, and as holding and inculcating opinions widely at variance with the common faith and usage of their church. They said much to discourage the adoration of the cross, the worship of images, and prayers to saints. These usages they described as savouring of idolatry. They denied that the bread in the Eucharist ever ceased to be bread. While not unwilling to relinquish their church endowments, they condemned the begging customs of the friars. In the spirit of Wycliffe, they denounced the religious orders as of purely human origin, as a reflection on the institutions of Christ as if wanting in adaptation to the needs of the Church. They spoke of the Bible as the only pure and infallible authority in regard to religion, and urged the people to trust in the promise of God, as there made to them, to the exclusion of all other dependence. grimages tended to dissoluteness more than to religion. The only true pilgrimage was to do the commandments of God. The most conspicuous amongst the clergy who suffered during this interval, as holding opinions more or less of this complexion, was the devout and conscientious Reginald Peacocke, successively Bishop of St. Asaph and of Chichester. Among his patrons were men in the first rank. But after much effort, his enemies prevailed against him, and the influence of his friends could do no more than soften the execution of the sentence which sent him from his episcopal residence to a prison.*

Summary,

Pil

It will be seen, then, that religious life in the middle age was exceptional, so much so, that it is sometimes difficult to know where to find it. Everywhere it comes, not so

*Lewis's Life of Peacocke. Collier's Eccles. Hist. i. 674-676. Wilkins's Concil.

much from the action of authority, as from spontaneous CHAP. II. influences-from light struggling through the darkness, from free impulses casting off the abounding restraints. Error is mixed with its truth, the not good is mixed with its good, but the true and the good are there. To the men who must think, and must be honest-honest in the sense of being faithful to their inward light-those long dark days were full of evil. Sovereigns and priests divided the dominion of body and soul between them, and in either department of rule were ready to visit divergence from the prescribed course of action or thought with the provided penalty. But the power of endurance was to be on the side of right, and the time in which the right should successfully claim its own was to come. We are now to follow the track of the great struggle in our history which has so far displaced these mediæval forms of intolerance and superstition, and has so far brought back to the Church of God among us its primitive light, and liberty, and life,

CHAPTER III.

Religious Life under the Tudors.

clergy CHAP. III.

HE Reformation, which severed our
from all dependence on the papacy,
them in a new subjection to the
Much of the authority which had been ceded

lations of

placed New reState. the State to the Church

from the

time of the

Refor

to the pontiffs now passed into the hands of our kings. The ecclesiasticism of the Vatican was succeeded by mation. the Erastianism of St. Stephen's. Our sovereigns no longer exercised a divided power in relation to the Church. Its headship was wholly vested in themselves. Not only the temporalities, but the spiritualities of the ecclesiastical establishment, came under their absolute control. There could be no ecclesiastical law without their sanction. In past time, they had connected civil penalties with what the clergy accounted religious error. They now take upon them to distinguish for themselves between truth and error, and to determine everything concerning law and penalty in regard to religion. They might consult the clergy, but they knew nothing of them in any higher capacity than as advisers. It was a new thing to be freed from the old aggressive power of

BOOK I. the court of Rome, but it was a new thing also to be subject to this augmented power on the part of the crown. Protestantism did well in asserting its independence of the papacy. It would have done better if it had abstained from raising the chief magistrate into the place of the supreme bishop. The mind of our country experienced a change of masters, and the change was for the better, but it was far from being for the best. The distinction between the tolerated and the not-tolerated continued, and to those who were hanged, burnt, or beheaded for their religious opinions, it was no great solace to be told that they suffered according to the law of the State, and not according to the law of the pope.

Sum of the
Refor-

Henry

Vill.

The parliament by whose means Henry VIII. accommation by plished his reformation, was assembled in 1529, and it was not dissolved till 1536. History has shown how the spiritual courts were then reformed; how the jurisdiction of the prelates was restrained and narrowed; how the legislative authority of the houses of convocation was brought to an end; how the clergy were made subject to the court of the magistrate, in common with the laity; how the magistrate was made to act as a check on all spiritual persons in their dealing with charges of heresy ; how the act against appeals to Rome, under any plea whatsoever, was followed by acts forbidding money contributions, in any form, to the papal treasury; and how, being thus shut out from all authority on English ground, the Bishop of Rome was at length declared to be no more than an ordinary bishop, and all persons were required to submit to the crown of England, as supreme over all persons and causes, civil or ecclesiastical, on pain of incurring the penalties of treason.

The