d Child. If the worshipper came to it with a good
handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious: if the present was
unsatisfactory, it turned away its head, and withheld its favours till
the purse-strings were untied again.

There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent,
where the pilgrims went in thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when
it was pleased; and a good sum of money was sure to secure its
good-will.

When the Reformation came, and the police looked into the matter, the
images were found to be worked with wires and pulleys. The German lady
was kept as a curiosity in the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our
Boxley rood was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was
afterwards torn in pieces by the people.

Nor here again was death the limit of extortion: death was rather the
gate of the sphere which the clergy made, peculiarly their own. When a
man died, his friends were naturally anxious for the fate of his soul.
If he died in communion, he was not in the worst place of all. He had
not been a saint, and therefore he was not in the best. Therefore he was
in purgatory--Purgatory Pickpurse, as our English Latimer called it--and
a priest, if properly paid, could get him out.

To be a mass priest, as it was called, was a regular profession, in
which, with little trouble, a man could earn a comfortable living. He
had only to be ordained and to learn by heart a certain form of words,
and that was all the equipment necessary for him. The masses were paid
for at so much a dozen, and for every mass that was said, so many years
were struck off from the penal period. Two priests were sometimes to be
seen muttering away at the opposite ends of the same altar, like a
couple of musical boxes playing different parts of the same tune at the
same time. It made no difference. The upper powers had what they wanted.
If they got the masses, and the priests got the money, all parties
concerned were satisfied.

I am speaking of the form which these things assumed in an age of
degradation and ignorance. The truest and wisest words ever spoken by
man might be abused in the same way.

The Sermon on the Mount or the Apostles' Creed, if recited mechanically,
and relied on to work a mechanical effort, would be no less perniciously
idolatrous.

You can see something of the same kind in a milder form in Spain at the
present day. The Spaniards, all of them, high and low, are expected to
buy an