202 OBSERVATIONS ON BISHOP BURNETT'S 
first-rate controvertist ; he was learned, acute, and pertinacious, 
quick to suspect and still quicker to condemn, fearless to assert and 
slow to retract,* and bent upon hunting down his prey in every 
form with the staunchness of a bloodhound. But, presuming to 
write before he had read to any other purpose than to adopt every 
historical evidence which favoured his own conclusions, the conse- 
quence is that, although his objections are delivered with an air of 
triumph and confidence, as if unanswerable, they really are so brit- 
tle as to fall to pieces upon the first handling. It would be tedious 
to examine all the particular facts which he would contradict, but 
we will notice a few, in order to prove that his articles of im- 
peachment are productive of no other effect than that of setting 
Burnett’s fidelity and accuracy in a more conspicuous light. 
The first place in which Collier overshoots the mark is, an al- 
leged mistake as to a matter of fact. Burnett had asserted that 
parents teaching the Lord’s prayer, the ten commandments, and the 
creed in the vulgar tongue, was crime enough to bring them to the 
stake. And for this piece of information, we are told by Collier 
that “ Burnett quotes no other authority than the martyrologist 
Fox, who only authenticates what he affirms by the testimony of 
one Mother Hall.” But if we turn to the pages of that venerable 
writer, who so diligently laboured in collecting records of ecclesias- 
tical antiquity, it will there be found that Bishop Longland is tran- 
scribed to prove that several were delated for teaching and learning 
* As a proof of this assertion, take the following passage from a pamphlet 
entitled A Specimen of the Gross Errors in the second volume of Mr. Collier’s 
“ Ecclesiastical History,” being a vindication of the right reverend and learned 
Dr. Gilbert Burnett, late Bishop of Sarum, from the several reflections made 
on him and his History of the Reformation, in the several places as it is noted 
in a late advertisement in the Evening Post, p. 42. “In order to show that 
Burnett is a falsifier of history, and not to be credited in any thing, he (Col- 
lier) writes that the two first editions of the Ordinal made in King Edward’s 
reign, printed with privilege by Grafton and Whitchurch, have none of the 
different rites mentioned by this gentleman. That these were the two first 
editions he now owns himself convinced; but still he can’t or wo’nt believe 
his lordship that the first Ordinal printed by Richard Grafton, the king’s 
printer, in the month of March, 1549, cum privilegio ad imprimendum so- 
lum, had any of the different rites mentioned by his lordship, till, by the 
favour of a gentleman uncommonly well furnished with curiosities of the 
press, that he had got a sight of, and he then says that, upon perusal, he finds 
the Bible laid upon the bishop’s neck, -the pastoral staff put in his hand, and 
the chalice, with bread in it for the priest, some of the consecrating and ordi- 
nary ceremonies; but not the least attempt to recal his censure, or to ask 
pardon for his partial and unreasonable mistrust of the bishop.” 
