we may consider the
inherent difficulty of disbelief in what--despite its increasing
corruptions--had been the unbroken faith of this country for a thousand
years.

We call the disillusionists, the Reformers; but FISH describes them as

men of greate litterature and iudgement that for the love they haue
vnto the trouth and vnto the comen welth haue not feared to put theim
silf ynto the greatest infamie that may be, in abiection of all the
world, ye[a] in perill of deth to declare theyre oppinion.... _p._
10.

Undoubtedly HENRY personally was the secular Apostle of the first phase of
our Reformation. The section of doctrinal Protestants was politically
insignificant: and it may be fairly doubted whether the King could have
carried the nation with him, but that in the experience of every
intelligent Englishman, the cup of the iniquity of the priesthood was full
to overflowing. He was aided by the strong general reaction of our simple
humanity against the horrid sensuality, the scientific villany offered to
it by the supposed special agents of Almighty GOD in the name of, and
cloaked under the authority believed to have been given to them from the
ever blessed Trinity.

Morality is the lowest expression of religion, the forerunner of faith. No
religion can be of GOD which does not instinctively preassume in its
votaries the constant striving after the highest and purest moral
excellence. It is an intolerable matter, beyond all possible sufferance,
when religion is made to pander to sensuality and extortion. How bitter a
thing this was to this barrister of Gray's Inn, may be seen in the strange
terms of terror and ravin with which he characterizes these "strong,
puissant, counterfeit holy, and idle beggars." To the untravelled
Englishman of Henry VIII's reign, "cormorants" must have meant some like
devouring griffins, and "locusts" as a ruthless irremediable and fearful
plague without end. By such mental conceptions of utter desolation,
impoverishment and misery does our Author express the bitterness of the
then proved experience by Englishmen, of the combined hierarchy and
monkery of Rome.

All which is for our consideration in estimating the necessity and policy
of the subsequent suppression of the monasteries.

These representations are also some mitigation of what is sometimes
thought to be the Protestant frenzy of our great Martyrologist, whose
words of burning reprobation of the Papal s