TAXES AND CONTRIBUTIONS. l6l 



Roman cardinal. Fox, the founder of Corpus Christ! College 

 in Oxford, is said to have left his home at an early age in 

 order to be trained for the Church, and on journeying down 

 some time afterwards to Lincolnshire, to have told his parents, 

 when they wished him to stay with them, that their home- 

 stead would not serve for the kitchen of the house that he 

 was building for himself. Never perhaps in the social history 

 of nations was there so great an opportunity for capacity 

 to "rise by acknowledged roads to dignity ; or in which the 

 beginnings of a great man, according to the judgment of 

 the time, were so rarely remembered against him. Perhaps 

 it is only when society seems to be firmly consolidated that 

 the traditions of descent are found to be a convenient protec- 

 tion to those who have the enjoyment of its immunities and 

 privileges. 



But with all the advantages which the position of the me- 

 dieval Church gave its members, modified to some extent by 

 the fact that the highest offices which it possessed were being 

 occupied, as we have said before, by the younger sons of 

 great families, though the bulk of its greatest emoluments 

 were still the reasonable objects of ambition to persons of 

 humbler origin, the Church became unpopular in the time 

 before us. This result, it appears, was due, in the first place, 

 to the exemption of its members from the obligation of an 

 equal contribution to public burdens- in the next, to the 

 fact of their being liable to a different system of justice; 

 and withal, to the common error of all ranks in society whose 

 condition exempts them, or seems to exempt them, from 

 listening to any external judgment, that of ignoring the obli- 

 gation which lies on all those who possess a great social 

 place, of perpetually vindicating the right by perpetually ful- 

 filling the duties involved in the right. In the case of any 

 corporation, in the case, still more, of a corporation which 

 continually needs to draft fresh members into its body from 

 the mass of the people, and which relies, as it should, only 

 on a complete understanding of the needs and ways of the 



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