nearly effaced the engravings." His
funeral, we are told, was attended by the assembled
princes and prelates and nobles of the council, who
followed him to the grave with every demonstration
of respect and sorrow.]

Bishop Hallam entertained a most rooted antipathy to the Pope and the
Popedom; and he once gave expression to his sentiments so freely and
unreservedly to the Pope himself, that his Holiness complained
grievously of him to the Emperor: but Sigismund was himself too
heartily bent on reforming the abuses of the Popedom to chide the zeal
and freedom of the English prelate. On one occasion the Bishop
maintained that a General Council was superior to the Pope (a doctrine
subsequently recognised, but then, as it should seem, new and bold);
on another he is reported to have gone so far as to affirm (p. 051)
that the Pope, for his enormities, deserved to be burnt alive. Bishop
Hallam[45] was by no means singular either in the sentiments which he
entertained with regard to the corruptions of the Romish Church "_in
its head and its members_," and the imperative necessity of an
universal reform, or in the unreserved boldness and plainness with
which he published those sentiments. The whole of Christendom rang
with loud and bitter complaints against the avarice, the sensuality,
the overreaching and overbearing tyranny, the total degeneracy and
worthlessness of the Popes, the Cardinals, and the religious orders;
but in no place were the protests against such deplorable (p. 052)
corruptions more unsparingly uttered than at the Council of Constance
itself: and among those who willingly offered themselves to testify,
in their Saviour's name, against such a prostitution of his blessed
Gospel to the purposes of worldly ambition, such gross depravity and
total neglect of duty, the names of many of our own countrymen are
recorded. These pillars of the church, these lights in the midst of
darkness, seem indeed to have entertained sentiments, as to the duties
and responsibilities of the Christian priesthood, worthy of the purest
age. Some of their recorded doctrines are truly edifying, and find a
response in some of the best episcopal charges and admonitions of the
Protestant church at the present day.

[Footnote 45: Anthony a Wood, referring to the
alleged resolution of the University of Oxford in