I In the case of images, so deeply seated was the CHAP popular idea of reality which was associated with them, that they were actually believed to move their eyes and mouths by some miraculous vital power, when the movements were, of course, contrived by mechanism. None but godless or infatuated men could have wished to perpetuate such habits as these among the people of England. All who were desirous for the revival of true religion must have striven earnestly for their suppression. The catalogue of superstitious customs might be easily extended. It might be shown-as, for example, from the "Mirror of our Lady" already quoted-that Mariolatry the exaggerated veneration of the most blessed and holy Mother of our Lord had been developed into habits and language which could not clearly be distinguished from Divine worship of her; that the invocation of saints had extended to so extravagant a length as to invade the intercession of Christ; that saints had been recognised by the Church as the workers of miracles, which they themselves would have been the first to repudiate; that many most ridiculous legends about saints were authoritatively Foolish circulated; that many old religious customs-such legends as pilgrimages-had degenerated into silly and vicious habits; and that practical religion was very generally overlaid with imaginative. But enough has been said to show that there was that in the 9 Sir Thomas More, writing to a monk, gives an account of a visit which he had recently paid to his sister at Coventry. A Franciscan friar had been preaching there to the effect that whoever repeated daily the Psalter of the Virgin would escape eternal damnation, The parish priest warned his people CHIAP religious system of pre-Reformation times which I really called for a change, which could not stand the test of intelligent inquiry, and which proved one great and just provocative of the Reformation. bility for these abuses And thus, to sum up, we may trace the origin of the Reformation to other causes as well as to the more-than-half political breach between England and National Rome. Our insular feelings tempt us, perhaps, to responsi throw too much of the responsibility of the evils growth of of the medieval Church of England upon our foreign connections, and to take too little to our own share as a Church and a nation. But a survey of the religious condition into which England had fallen at the end of the medieval period shows that there was much of what may be called native degeneration, and that we cannot justly burden the back of Rome with all our ecclesiastical sins. Much evil, no doubt, had fallen around our uncatholic and unpatriotic submission to the Roman yoke, but the prime cause of that evil was our national folly in submitting to it at all. It is to be feared, however, that the constitutional, doctrinal, and ritual mistakes which have been indicated, owed their growth, and sometimes their origin, to causes which were perfectly within the control of the Church of England, the kings of England, and the people of England, if they had chosen to control them. That attempts had been made to check the growth of some of these errors will be shown in subsequent chapters of this work; but it cannot unfortunately be shown that these attempts extended much beyond the political part of the question, so far as the ruling powers and the national will were concerned. Men here and there, good and farseeing I unwilling men, called out for a reformation of the Church of CHAP England, but the people at large were content to settle down on their lees, and did not support the National call. When reformation came, it carried the sove- ness to be reign and the people with it, rather against their will reformed than otherwise; and there has been always too great a disposition, from that time to this, to throw on others the blame of those sins and errors which made it necessary, instead of crying out honestly, "We have sinned, both we and our fathers." Protestantism has, in fact, been the great hindrance to reformation from the sixteenth century downwards, just as Romanism was the great hindrance to reformation in preceding centuries. It has dealt ostentatiously with mere surface evils, but left untouched those which were more deeply-rooted; it has diverted men's minds from essential principles, and fixed them upon comparative trifles; and it has tended as much as Romanism itself to the substitution of foreign for native elements in the Church of England. CHAP II Wolsey repre sented THE CHAPTER II WOLSEY'S INITIATION OF THE REFORMATION [A.D. 1514-1529] HE first effective impulse was given to the Reformation as an orderly ecclesiastical work by the great Cardinal Wolsey, whose services to the Church of England have been almost ignored by the ordinary historians, and whose acts were grossly misrepresented by most writers who had to deal with the events of his age, until the publication of the State Papers revealed their true character. We now much mis- know that it was Wolsey who broke up the medieval system and laid the broad foundations on which later statesmanship built up our national independence and greatness. And we know also that nearly every class of measures undertaken for the purpose of establishing the independence and re-settlement of the Church of England was initiated by this great statesman. When he fell, England received so great a shock in her domestic and foreign relations, that she did not recover from it until the time of Queen Elizabeth and it may be reasonably thought that if the Reformation had been fully developed under his continued guidance, many of the miserable divisions which ensued would have been avoided by his astute statesmanship, and the barbarities of each CHAP side checked by his humane policy. It is not necessary, for the purposes of this work, to give many particulars respecting the personal history of this unrivalled statesman. When it has been said that he was born at Ipswich, in March 1471, that he was the son of a poor gentleman,1 that he became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, Master of Magdalen School, and Bursar of his College, nothing further need be told respecting his life previous to the year 1509. rise to power When Henry VIII. came to the throne, he found Wolsey's Wolsey (who had already gained the good opinion of Henry VII. as a promising public man) Dean of Lincoln, he being then about forty years of age, and the King only eighteen. Six months afterwards Wolsey is heard of as Almoner, and his preferments henceforth all came from the Crown, until they culminated in the Archbishopric of York [1514], and the Chancellorship, to the latter of which offices he was appointed on December 22, 1515. He had been made Cardinal by the Pope about three months before the latter date; and long before that honour was conferred on him, he had risen from a confidential position, which was practically that of a Secretary of State, to the still higher position which is known in modern times as that of Prime Minister. The latter was his position from about the year 1513 to the year 1529. A shrewd observer who was ambassador from the 1 The tradition that he was the son of a butcher originated in a saying of Charles V., when told of the Duke of Buckingham's execution, that the best "Buck" in England had been slain by a "butcher's dog." But the Em- |