of natural
causes was neglected, from the universal belief of miraculous
interpositions and judgments; bounty to the Church atoned for every
violence against society; and the remorses for cruelty, murder,
treachery, assassination, and the more robust vices, were appeased, not
by amendment of life, but by penances, servility to the monks, and an
abject and illiberal devotion.[74] The reverence for the clergy had been
carried to such a height that wherever a person appeared in a sacerdotal
habit, though on the highway, the people flocked around him, and,
showing him all marks of profound respect, received every word he
uttered as the most sacred oracle. Even the military virtues, so
inherent in all the Saxon tribes, began to be neglected; and the
nobility, preferring the security and sloth of the cloister to the
tumults and glory of war, valued themselves chiefly on endowing
monasteries, of which they assumed the government. The several kings,
too, being extremely impoverished by continual benefactions to the
Church, to which the states of their kingdoms had weakly assented, could
bestow no rewards on valor or military services, and retained not even
sufficient influence to support their government.

Another inconvenience which attended this corrupt species of
Christianity was the superstitious attachment to Rome, and the gradual
subjection of the kingdom to a foreign jurisdiction. The Britons, having
never acknowledged any subordination to the Roman pontiff, had conducted
all ecclesiastical government by their domestic synods and councils; but
the Saxons, receiving their religion from Roman monks, were taught at
the same time a profound reverence for that see, and were naturally led
to regard it as the capital of their religion. Pilgrimages to Rome were
represented as the most meritorious acts of devotion. Not only noblemen
and ladies of rank undertook this tedious journey, but kings themselves,
abdicating their crowns, sought for a secure passport to heaven at the
feet of the Roman pontiff. New relics, perpetually sent from that
inexhaustible mint of superstition, and magnified by lying miracles,
invented in convents, operated on the astonished minds of the multitude.
And every prince has attained the eulogies of the monks, the only
historians of those ages, not in proportion to his civil and military
virtues, but to his devoted attachment toward their order, and his
superstitious reverence for Rome.

The sovereign p