Mahommed as an impostor? The history of his life would remain the same, but the Turks would have learnt to examine it. There were always men who knew what Dunstan had been, because they were men of the same stamp, and acted upon the same principles; but these were his successors in the craft, and of course would not betray its secrets; and if there were others who saw the truth, they dared not utter it till the Reformation brought with it liberty as well as light.

It was not therefore in any hurry of composition that I spake* of Dunstan's successors as disposed to uphold the ascendancy which they had founded upon deceit, by uncommunicated knowledge and unrelenting severity. You are pleased (and in this instance with an urbanity of manner whereof controversial writings afford few examples) to express your surprize that such expressions should have fallen from my pen; for, were not monasteries," you ask,† "the only schools? and was not knowledge most liberally communicated in them?" Those schools indeed have been of infinite service to mankind; ... of such service that their beneficial consequences have far outbalanced all the evil,

66

* Book of the Church, i. 14.

+ Page 73.

great as that has been and is, of the institutions with which they were connected... But the secrets of monkery and priestcraft were not taught in them,... the knowledge in mechanics, in optics, in acoustics, by which wonders were performed,... nor the daring impiety which scrupled not at employing such means to such an end, and which implies in too many leading spirits of their age a total disbelief of the religion which they professed.

I am not here supposing a confederacy like that of the Illuminés; nor that the Romish Clergy had their mysteries wherein it was disclosed to the initiated that all which the vulgar were taught to believe, was for the vulgar only. Some of your Popes and Cardinals, however, have been greatly belied by each other, if they did not hold the whole of Christianity for a fable...and as much belied by historians of their own communion and their own times, if they did not act as if they thought so. These indeed were monsters of wickedness. is not to such men among the Romish Clergy that infidelity is confined; it is not to the dissolute and the daring, those in whom the heart corrupts the understanding, or they who are betrayed by the pride of intellect into errors as gross as the grossest devices of superstition.

But it

Persons of a better mould, who are disposed by nature to sincerity and the virtues connected with it, when they find themselves unawares engaged in a system of deceit, feel that the foundation of their faith is shaken. Mr. Blanco White has shown us that this is no imaginary case. I could tell you too of Priests in a Romish country where they had no Inquisition to fear, whose practice it was to disabuse, as they called it, those of their parishioners in whom they had any confidence. You have brought a charge, Sir, of insincerity against the Ministers of the Church of England, which has been repelled by one eminently worthy of the high station in that Church whereto he has been called. Are you as able on your part to rebut the assertion, that in those countries where the Romish religion has most hold upon the people, infidelity is common among the Clergy?... Would it surprize you, Sir, to meet with it at Naples, at Loretto, and in Rome itself? Do you think that none of the Popes have suspected their own infallibility, and the purity of the Church over which they presided? Or that they who grant indulgencies, and they who sell them, have as much faith in the article as those by whom it is purchased?

You are equally astonished at a supposition

that Dunstan's successors would have maintained their power by unrelenting severity. This appears so strange to you that you cannot bring to your recollection even a single fact which supports it; and you declare that, till you perused the Book of the Church, you never found this charge, or any thing like it, made or insinuated. Indeed, Sir! Has history been so silent? Or was there ever such a system of unrelenting severity pursued century after century, as that by which the Romish Church upheld its power, wherever it was opposed, till the Reformation delivered part of Europe from its inhuman and intolerable yoke? By some strange misapprehension you have persuaded yourself that an imputation of cruelty against the Romish priesthood,... that priesthood which preached up the crusade against the Albigenses, and established the Inquisition, ..might be disposed of* by quoting in reply the eulogium of a Protestant historian upon the government of certain ecclesiastical states during the dark ages! an eulogium relating wholly to their policy, and the management of their temporal concerns!

* Page 73.

INVESTITURES.

CONCERNING the subject of Investitures we appear to differ less in opinion than upon matters of fact. You suppose me to be aware that monarchs had usurped the exclusive right of nominating to vacant sees: whereas the received opinion among* English antiquaries and historians is, that bishoprics were originally donatives, as being of the King's foundation, till they were made elective by Henry I. from whom the right of nomination, which Blackstone calls" that antient prerogative of the crown," was wrested. The usurpation

† Book iv. c. viii.

was

In

* Gibson's Codex, 104. In a letter which Nicolas Clemangis addressed to Gregory XIII. on his election to the Popedom, this is plainly stated. "The burden with which you are charged," says the honest counsellor, " is so much the heavier because you and your predecessors have taken upon yourselves many charges from which the Lord and the Church had exempted you. making yourselves the masters of elections to benefices, of collations, dispensations, and all which was formerly done by the Archdeacons and Patrons, you have infinitely increased the account which you will have to render. True it is that if you acquit yourself faithfully of your administration, there is no empire upon earth which can approach the glory of your servitude. But if you make your dignity subservient to your profit,