284 On the Suppression of Monasteries in England. (Serr. 
the minds of men to investigate the abstruse doctrines, from any examination 
of which they would a century before have shrunk in dismay. |: Not» to: men- 
tion the shock which staunch Catholics had received from >the worst, exercise 
of the worst practice of the Romish church—the sale of a general indulgence, 
published by the great De Medicis, Leo X.—other causes had long, been secretly’ 
at work, and the fire had been spreading itself, unseen, which was one day .to 
burst into so splendid an illumination. + aici 4 
From the earliest times of apostolic simplicity, amid all the changes of the 
first centuries, and through all the darkness of the middle ages, there seems to 
have been aremnant, deriving their principles and doctrines from tradition, and 
unmingled with those vast superstitions which spread their pinions over the 
greater part of the old world. These purer votarists, holding their tenets 
apparently from oral delivery, seem to have been split into varieties of sects, 
as their traditions varied from each other. But their belief, in its worst modi- 
fications, appears at all events to have been more pure, and their worship 
more rational, than those which were estadlished in their days; and to have 
been productive of a meek sincerity, a humble piety, and an uncomplaining 
self-devotion, that, in such times, might redeem darker errors, and recommend 
wilder heresies than theirs, Through evil report and good report, they held 
fast and unwavering the profession of their faith ; and there seems ever to have 
been a little flock in the wilderness, worshipping in a temple, and with rites 
which (whatever might be the abstract errors of their creed) were at least 
free from the charge of idolatry. To the Manicheans succeeded the Paulicians, 
and to the Paulicians the Paterins and Albigenses ; and it is singularly interest- 
ing to trace them in their wide wanderings for so many ages—solicitous as they 
ever were for the preservation of that one only treasure, for whose sake they 
had been content to abandon all others; sheltering themselves, when perse- 
cuted, amongst the quiet hills and by the still waters; happy in the indulgence 
of their own high and holy aspirations, and in the exercises of meek and mild 
devotion ; but never surrendering to threats or to intreaties that sacred deposit, 
which, iike the widow’s cruse of oil, wasted not, in all those ages of moral and 
religious dearth ; but which, like the hidden leaven, was and is destined gra- 
dually to expand itself amongst the nations of the earth, until the whole: be 
leavened. And as the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the primitive 
church, so the devastation of Languedoc, and the establishment of the 
Inquisition against the persecuted Albigeois, were the origin of the Re- 
formation. : 
The principles of dissent from the infallibility of the Popish hierarchy had 
reached England, and the preaching of the great and learned John Wickliffe 
had scattered seed which (notwithstanding the apparent suppression of the 
Lollards, who had embraced his speculative tenets, by the execution of Lord 
Cobham, half a century afterwards) was destined, like the grain of mustard- 
seed sown in the earth, to spring up into amighty tree, within whose branches 
the beautiful truths of religion, like the birds of heaven, should lodge, and 
beneath whose broad shadow these reformed islands should repose. To Wick- 
liffe succeeded John Huss, in Bohemia;—and these repeated instances of 
opposition to the doctrines of the Holy See had prevailed upon men to look 
with less delicacy into its principles, and to examine more closely its preten- 
sions, and had effectually laid in the human mind the foundations of that 
grand structure of reformation which Martin Luther, himself a monk, was 
appointed to complete. 
The progress of that grand mental resuscitation which was rapidly proceed- 
ing, received a mighty impulse from the invention of printing about the middle 
of the fifteenth century; and the time was now come when those treasures of 
ancient learning, which had so long slumbered in the gloom of cloisters, might, if 
released from their confinement, be spread by this multiplying medium over 
all Europe. All things seemed to have ‘been gradually contributing to that 
great consummation which the sixteenth century was to see achieved in 
England, and the whole system of moral and intellectual beauty appeared to be 
