other hymns and collects, in English; and several of them in the same version now used in the litany.* The monasteries were plundered by the King, and their spoils afforded him a rich supply to his wants. With respect to some subjects in dispute between the Church of Rome and the Protestants, his opinions were wavering and unsettled; and the winds of heaven were not more uncertain than the winds of doctrine by which he ordered the faith of his subjects to be regulated. What was published as the standard of Orthodoxy at one time, and enforced by the threat of death, was soon after condemned, and the opposite doctrine enforced by the same penalty. With indiscriminate vengeance, those who believed in the Pope's Supremacy, and those who denied the doctrine of the Real Presence in the sacrament, Papists and Protestants, fell the victims of his infuriate bigotry. During the remainder of Henry's life, the principles of genuine Christianity, though openly resisted with all the violence of power, were gradually diffusing themselves through the mass of society, till, like the little leaven hid in the three measures of meal, the whole lump was leavened.

The reign of his son, Edward VI, was, in England, the auspicious era of the Reformation. The doctrines of the Protestant faith were not only rescued from persecution, but obtained all the sanction that human laws could give them. Images were removed from all the Churches. The communion was ordered to be administered to the laity, in both kinds; private masses were abolished, and many superstitious practices were ordered to be discontinued. Forty-two articles of religion were

• Wheatley's Illustration of the Book of Common Prayer, p. p. 24, 25.

drawn up by Archbishop Cranmer and Bishop Ridley, and being approved by the Convocation, were published in Latin and in English. A new liturgy was composed, all the offices of which were to be performed in the vulgar tongue, and from it all prayers to saints were carefully excluded. The celibacy of the Clergy, though recommended, was to be no longer enforced. In short, the most obnoxious doctrines of popery, by which men had been retained in ignorance of the great truths of Christianity, and in the practice of superstitious and idolatrous rites, and in the shackles of spiritual tyranny, were renounced. To one of the most unjust, unrelenting, and disgraceful principles and practices of the Church of Rome, the leaders of the Church of England, in common with all other Protestants, continued rigidly to adhere. The liberty which they so justly claimed, to choose for themselves the tenets of their faith, they obstinately refused to give to others, and the fires from which they had so lately and so narrowly escaped, they readily lighted to destroy those whose claims stood upon the same footing with their own. That spirit of intolerance which was the bane and the disgrace of the Reformation, and which made Christians mutually unjust, as well as cruel to each other, continued for a long period afterwards to disgrace religion, and to poison in the source, the streams of human comfort. It tortures every principle of our sensibility, to behold the venerable, the pious, the generous, the mild, and the gentle Cranmer, persuading Edward to commit to the flames, Joan of Kent, a poor deluded enthusiast, or perhaps rather a maniac, for whom compassion would have prescribed solitary confinement and a physician. To the honour of that most amiable Prince it is recorded, that when he could no longer re

sist the importunity of the Primate, he burst into tears, and told him that if any wrong was done, the guilt should be entirely on his head. Several Baptists, and one Arian, were condemned, and, with the same cruelty and injustice, burnt alive. Had Cranmer, and those excellent men, who, not from malignity of disposition, but from an error they brought with them from the Church of Rome, acted a principal part in these tragedies, only remembered the great rule of Christian morality, to do to others as they wished to be done by, they would have revered the prerogative of Heaven, and left even the worst of heretics to His judgment, to whom alone vengeance belongs. When laws so tyrannical were executed with a severity so unrelenting, it was no wonder that the Princess Mary could, with the greatest difficulty, procure a connivance from the Council, at her private use of the mass. The persecution she suffered from the Protestants had, probably, considerable influence in disposing her to inflict severities afterwards upon them, and would also probably be considered as a sufficient apology for their infliction.

By the death of Edward, who expired in the sixteenth year of his age, and in the seventh of his reign, the Church and Nation of England suffered a loss which it was not easy to repair. The opening germ of his talents, both natural and acquired, his native virtues, the fervor of his devotion, the gentleness and flexibility of his manners, his vigorous application to both study and business, his high sense of justice and equity, which far exceeded what could be expected at his years, the tender sympathies of his nature, which melted at every scene of distress, had raised to the highest pitch the expectations of his subjects; and the blossoms of the spring had induced

them to hope for a noble harvest, when all these excellent qualities of their Sovereign should be ripened and mellowed. But all these accomplishments, of so great promise, were to be matured in a soil and climate more congenial to their nature, and where there is no more curse; and therefore they were translated from earth to Heaven, to ripen before the throne of God and the Lamb.

Soon after the acoession of Mary, the whole fabric which, in her brother's reign, had been raised with so careful and so pious a hand, was demolished, and all its beauties laid in the dust. Popery, with all its absurd and impious doctrines, its cumberous rites, its extravagant pretensions, and its idolatrous worship, reared its polluted dome, on the former site of the temple of truth; and, that the consecration might be worthy of the pile, it was sprinkled with the blood of hundreds of human sacrifices. The fires were every where lighted, and victims carefully selected to be sacrificed around the altars of superstition. No station was so elevated, as to afford protection from the tyranny and cruelty,-no condition so humble, as to escape the vigilance of the Ecclesiastical despotism and rage, over which this female fury presided. Like another Tisiphone, let out from Stygian darkness, upon this upper world, she brandished her flaming torch, and called for fresh victims to feed the flames she had kindled. With a gloomy delight, this priestess of Moloch, saw her altars fattened with human gore. In mercy to mankind, it pleased Heaven to call her from this scene of blood and slaughter, before her appetite was gorged with the torments of human nature, to give an account of the the blood she had spilt.

havock she had made, and Archbishop Grindal reckons

the number of those who were burnt in her reign, to have been eight hundred; but Bishop Burnet, in his history of the Reformation, makes them two hundred and eighty-four.

When death had disburdened our island of this fiend, and Elizabeth had succeeded to the throne, justice and mercy returned to their former habitation, and true religion rose out of her grave, to smile upon, and to bless the children of men. The temple of the living God was rebuilt, and while Truth sprang from the earth, Righteousness looked down from Heaven. The Protestant religion was restored to the establishment it obtained in Edward's reign. The Supremacy was, by an act of Parliament, annexed to the Crown, and the Queen was denominated, Governess of the Church. By this act the Crown was invested with power, without the concurrence either of the Parliament, or of the Convocation, to repress all heresies, and might establish or repeal any canons, might alter every point of discipline, and might ordain or abolish any religious rite and ceremony. In determining what was heresy, the sovereign was only limited to such doctrines as had been adjudged heresy, by the authority of the Scriptures; by the first four general councils; or by any general council which followed the Scripture as their rule; or to such other doctrine as should hereafter be denominated heresy, by the Parliament and Convocation.

The character of Elizabeth has justly obtained a distinguished place among those of the great Sovereigns who, by their wisdom, their penetration, their learning, their love of their country, and their highly cultivated talents, have conferred more honour upon thrones and sceptres, than they derived from them. She was, however, a Prin