‘HISTORY OF THE REFORMATION.” 205 
Wiclif,” if he could have put forth or countenanced an opinion 
which has such manifest tendency to subvert all legal authority. 
It can hardly fail to strike a well-informed reader that it is inten- 
tionally to misrepresent Burnett to make him refer to the reign of 
King Edgar for the settlement of the monks in England; whereas 
Burnett only refers to this period for the commencement of the in- 
crease of that order. “From the days of King Edgar,” says he, 
“the state of monkery had been still growing in England.” The 
time when the monks became a scandal to religion, and an outrage 
to decency, from the dissoluteness of their morals, and from their 
expensive and joyous mode of living, is specifically applied by Bur- 
nett to the period when they were settled in most of the cathedrals of 
England, and were possessed of the best church benefices ; a period 
which any one conversant in our ecclesiastical annals well knows was 
long after the days of King Edgar. 
When Collier tells us that “the bishop’s remark won’t hold, of 
suffragans being put down by degrees from the ninth century,” we 
haye another proof of his wilful perversion of Burnett’s meaning ; 
for to imagine the historian of the Reformation, who pored over so 
many quartos and folios upon episcopal government in the different 
ages of the chnrch, ignorant of that of which any one who has ac- 
quired the slightest tincture of ecclesiastical history must be aware, 
is alike inconsistent with truth and probability, It were, indeed, to 
divest Burnett of all acquaintance even with what may be called the 
elements of theological learning, to suspect him not to have known 
that in England, down to the era of the Reformation, our bishops 
had deputies, whom they denominated their suffragans,* and who had 
been consecrated bishops of sees in partibus infidelium. These, how- 
ever, differ materially from the Choroepiscopi spoken of by Burnett, 
whose order was abolished, both in the east and west, before the end 
of the tenth century. 
* The pretext assigned for consecrating six and twenty suffragans in the 
reign of Henry was, the frequent employment of bishops in foreign embas- 
sies, or in offices of the court. To these spiritual functionaries was delegated 
the power, in the absence of the diocesan, of consecrating churches and 
churchyards, conferring orders, confirming children, and other episcopal func- 
tions. But as, in these enlightened times, learning and intelligence are not 
' confined to ecclesiastics, so the startling anomaly of clerical statesmen no 
longer exists to offend alike the eye of religion and reason. It is a mistake 
to imagine, as some writers have, that their functions ceased in our church 
at the period of 1688.—See Edin. Miscell. 1692, p. 12. For Dr. Brett tells 
us, in a letter of his, in Drake’s History of Yorkshire, that the last of these 
bishops died in 1776. 
