316 



ON THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE. 



praved, before the Reformation, had grown to a greater height in Scotland 

 than in any other nation within the pale of the western church. Superstition 

 and religious imposture, in their grossest forms, gained an easy admission 

 among a rude and ignorant people. By means of these the clergy attained 

 to an exorbitant degree of opulence and power; which were accompanied, as 

 they always have been, with the corruption of their order, and of the whole 

 system of religion. The full half of the wealth of the nation belonged to the 

 clergy ; and the greater part of this was hi the hands of a few of their num- 

 ber, who had the command of the whole body. Avarice, ambition, and the 

 love of secular pomp reigned among the superior orders. Bishops and 

 ibbots rivalled the first nobility in magnificence, and preceded them in 

 honours. They were privy-counsellors and lords of session as well as of 

 parliament, and had long engrossed the principal offices of state. A vacant 

 bishopric or abbacy called forth powerful competitors, who contended for it 

 as for a principality or petty kingdom : it was obtained by similar arts, and 

 not unfrequently taken possession of by the same weapons. Inferior bene- 

 fices were openly put to sale or bestowed on the illiterate and unworthy minis- 

 ters of courtiers; on dice-players, strolling bards, and bastards of bishops. 

 — There was not such a thing known as for a bishop to preach: — the practice 

 was even gone into desuetude among all the secular clergy, and wholly de- 

 volved on the mendicant monks, who employed it for the most mercenary 

 purposes. 



" The lives of the clerg;^% exempted from secular jurisdiction, and corrupted 

 by wealth and idleness, were become a scandal to religion, and an outrage on 

 decency. While they professed chastity, and prohibited, under the severest 

 penalties, any of the ecclesiastical order from contracting lawful wedlock, 

 the bishops set the example of the most shameless profligacy before the infe- 

 rior clergy ; avowedly kept their harlots ; provided their natural sons with 

 benefices, and gave their daughters in marriage to the sons of the nobility and 

 principal gentry; many of whom were so mean as to contaminate the blood 

 of their families by such base alliances for the sake of the rich dowries which 

 they brought. 



" Through the blind devotion and munificence of princes and nobles, 

 monasteries, those nurseries of superstition and idleness, had greatly multi- 

 plied in the nation ; and though they had universally degenerated, and were 

 notoriously become the haunts of lewdness and debauchery, it was deemed 

 impious and sacrilegious to reduce their number, abridge their privileges, or 

 alienate their funds. 



" The ignorance of the clergy respecting religion was as gross as the dis- 

 soluteness of their morals. Even bishops were not ashamed to confess that 

 they were unacquainted with the canon of their faith, and had never read any 

 part of the sacred Scriptures, except what they met with in their missals."* 



It is not, then, to be wondered at, that, under so repugnant and scandalizing 

 a state of things, notwithstanding the darkness and deformity of the times, 

 mankind should in every part of Europe be growing ripe for a change, and 

 that the still small voice of the conscientious few, who exposed and resisted 

 the corruption around them, should be working with a v^holesome ferment 

 amid the general mass ; that that elastic power of the human mind, which, in 

 our own day, we have seen in Spain, in Russia, in Germany, and may yet, 

 perhaps, see in France,f rising with indignant recoil against t)ie domestic or 

 foreign tyranny by which it had been long bowed down, should be swelling, 

 and labouring, and maturing to the same effect, in the case before us ; co-ope- 

 rating with the intrepid voice of Wyckliff in our own country, and with the 

 ashes of Huss and Jeremy of Prague, that were not in vain sprinkled over the 

 guilty soil of Switzerland, and effecting that important revolution, which rea- 

 son, religion, and common sense equally vilified and insulted, equally called 

 aloud for and sanctioned. 



II. At this very period, in the year of our own era 1445, Constantinople, the 



• Life of John Knox, p. 14—20. 



t The prediction is fulfilled. The passage was delivered, during the usurpation of Napoleon, in 1813 



