380 OBSERVATIONS ON BISHOP BURNETT'S 
historian that, unless there was a marriage in fact, Henry’s plea for 
a dissolution of the contract between himself and Catharine, on the 
ground of a scrupulous conscience, must have been done away with 
entirely. Very evident, however, does it appear to us, that if Hen- 
ry had never gazed on the loveliness of Anne Boleyn, he never 
would have agitated the lawfulness of his first marriage. Burnett; 
then, sets himself to swim against the stream of public opinion, when 
he endeavours to persuade his readers that the eause of Henry’s re- 
morse for his first nuptials was occasioned by Thomas Aquinas,37 
the king’s favorite author, who held the Levitical law to be of moral 
and permanent obligation. The “ angelic doctor,” as he is styled by 
the disputants of the schools, and who is said, by a modern historian; 
to have ‘‘ the rare merit of combining great perspicuity and purity 
of expression, with all the refined distinctions and speculations of 
the schoolmen,” no doubt served him with arguments and quirks how 
best to support a bad cause ; but his dictum would not have weighed 
a feather with Henry if his licentious passions? ’—if the queen’s be-= 
ing six years older than himself, unlikely to bear him any more chil= 
dren, and her person disagreeable to him, from the many infirmities 
to which she was subject, had not first been virtually subversive of 
those memorable words of our Saviour, “and I say unto you, who- 
37 Turner, Hist. of England, vol: ii, p. 583. The writings of that volumi- 
hous author’(“‘ses ouvrages,” says Dupin, “composent 17 tomes, in folio”), 
were so popular among the ultra popish party, as to become a sort of textu- 
ary with them. Dean Colet, a nomen memorabile with us, appears to have 
formed more sound conclusions respecting this oracle of the schoolmen. “EI 
said somewhat more in praise of Aquinas: he (Colet) looked wistfully upon 
me, to observe whether I spoke in jest or earnest: he raised himself into 
some warmth, and said, “ why are you so fond of commending that school- 
man who, without a great deal of arrogance, could never have reduced all 
things into such positive and dogmatical definitions ; and without too much 
of a worldly spirit he could never have so much corrupted and defiled the 
pure doctrine of the Gospel with his mixture of prophane philosophy. I ad- 
mired this freedom of Colet in censuring the head and father of the Thomists, 
and it made nie look a little more narrowly into the writings of that cele- 
brated schoolman, which; when I had done, it abated very much of my for- 
mer esteem for him.”—Knight’s Erasmus, 49. 
38 Every check he received to them only gave additional intensity to his 
desire for their realization. His pen was incessantly in his hand on the af- 
fair of his divorce. Besides being in continual correspondence on this sub- 
ject with his ministers at home and abroad, he composed a short treatise on 
the Levitical degrees, to shew the unlawfulness of his marriage. Alluding 
to his performance in one of his letters to Anne, he says, “that his book 
thaketh substantially for his purpose, and that he has been writing it four 
hours that day.”—Hearne’s Avesbury, p. 360. 
