Depressed state of the Church of Ireland before the Reformation. SECTION I. Review of the Condition of the Church. Recognition of the King's Supremacy intended. Archbishop Cromer's opposition. Co-operating obstacles. George Browne made Archbishop of Dublin. Ineffectual effort of the King's Commissioners. Parliament of 1537. Acts relative to the Church. AT the era of the Reformation, the Church of Ireland partook of those marks which were inherent in the Church of England also, as well as in the other churches of western Christendom. The true word of God was not preached by her ministers, nor acknowledged by her people, through the general ignorance or prohibition of the Holy Scriptures. Legendary tales maintained an ascendency over the Christian verity. Transubstantiation, wafer-worship, and half-communion; auricular confession, and discretionary absolution; purgatory, pilgrimages, penances, and indulgences; the invocation of saints, and the adoration of images and reliques: all conspiring to derogate from God's honour, and to lay false foundations for man's hope of salvation; were some of the enormities which deformed her creed and religious practice. The sacraments of Christ were partly withheld, or superstitiously administered: they, as likewise the publick prayers of the Church, were celebrated in a strange tongue: and certain other ecclesiastical ordinances were raised to the dignity of the two sacraments of Christ. Celibacy was enjoined upon her clergy. They, as well as her people, were little distinguished for moral or intellectual improvement. Monastick establishments existed to a great and very detrimental extent. And of those who bore the episcopal office in her communion, her four archbishops and twenty-six bishops, the appointment was conferred, the allegiance claimed, and the rights and privileges circumscribed by a foreign potentate: from whom the metropolitans had submitted to receive their archiepiscopal palls from the middle of the twelfth century, in acknowledgment of the Papal supremacy. King's supre- macy, first step It was by the abrogation of this supremacy, and the assertion of the sovereign's right to the undivided dominion over all his subjects, as well ecclesiastical as civil, that the first advance was made towards the reformation of religion, the providence of God converting the counsels of the monarch for the maintenance of his own royal prerogative into the means of purifying and renovating his Church. King Henry the Eighth having succeeded in causing Year of our Lord his supremacy in the Church of England to be "recognised by the clergy, and authorized by Parliament," was desirous of establishing the like supremacy in the Church of Ireland, "forasmuch as Ireland was depending and belonging justly and rightfully to the imperial crown of England'." 1 Eng. Stat. 26 Henry VIII., c. 1. Irish Stat. 26 Henry VIII., c. 5. 1537. Opposition of Difficulties arising from the general state of the country. But his desire met with a powerful opponent in Cromer, archbishop of Armagh, who had lately held the highest civil office of Lord Chancellor in the kingdom; and who, still occupying the first ecclesiastical dignity of Primate of all Ireland, exerted the influence derived from his publick stations, aided by the personal qualities, which he is related to have borne, "of great gravity, learning, and a sweet demeanour," in alluring his suffragan bishops and inferior clergy to support the Pope's supremacy in despite of the pretensions of the king". The general condition of the country; the disunion, dissensions, and mutual jealousies which prevailed among different classes of its inhabitants, especially between those of different national origin or parentage; the hereditary antipathy in the descendants of the earlier inhabitants against the sovereign, as not of indigenous extraction, nor a native of the soil; their prevalent disposition to indulge in resistance to his authority, and to seek assistance from foreign powers to support them in their resistance; the remoteness of their situation, which rendered them less accessible to the visitations of the king's power, and less fearful of his indignation; their continual intestine agitations, which had indisposed the mind, and afforded little convenient occasion for speculative inquiries, and for intellectual or spiritual improvement; the absence of any pervious extraordinary impulse for directing the mind to seek for knowledge, and the want of literary institutions for giving efficacy to the impulse if it had existed; the people's habitual subjection to their clergy, and the ignorance of the clergy themselves, and their blind and superstitious devotion to • WARE'S Bishops, p. 91. their ecclesiastical superiors; the long and deeprooted prepossession in favour of one, who had pretended to supreme authority in the church for three or four centuries, and whose character they had been accustomed to venerate as all but divine; and with all this a persuasion of the fact, that the earliest English king, who had claimed dominion in Ireland, derived his claim in the first place from a Papal grant, so that the royal authority, however it may have been afterwards upheld, had been originally, as they were taught to believe, founded on a power which it now sought to displace and supersede: these and the like impediments in the state and prepossessions of the inhabitants co-operated with the zeal of the primate, in obstructing the inroad, which the dominion of the sovereign was attempting to make on that of the Pope. Upon the difficulties arising from the circumstances of the country it is not proposed to dwell; but as to the sentiment of the English sovereignty being derived from a foreign source, it may be briefly remarked, that the claim of the kings of England to the dominion of Ireland was independent of any Papal authority. Whatever right Pope Adrian may have pretended to possess or to exercise in the bestowal of that kingdom on King Henry the Second, he had by right, as Sir John Davies has remarked, "no more interest in this kingdom than he which offered to Christ all the kingdoms of the earth"." And in point of fact, to use the words of Archbishop Ussher, "Whatsoever become of the Pope's idle challenges, the crown of England hath otherwise obtained an undoubted right unto the sovereignty 3 Discovery why Ireland was never entirely Subdued, by Sir J. DAVIES, p. 15. Edit. 1747. Appointment of George Browne to the Archbishoprick of Dublin. of this country; partly by conquest, prosecuted at first upon occasion of a social war, partly by the several submissions of the chieftains of the land made afterwards. For whereas it is free for all men, although they have been formerly quit from all subjection, to renounce their own right, yet now in these our days, (saith Giraldus Cambrensis, in his History of the Conquest of Ireland,) all the princes of Ireland did voluntarily submit, and bind themselves with firm bonds of faith and oath unto Henry the Second, king of England"." With respect, indeed, to the Pope's imaginary right, and the consequent grant to Henry the Second, it has been stated that "the Irish parliament had occasionally acknowledged this to be the only legitimate foundation of the authority of the crown of England3.” But neither by the statutes of King Edward the Fourth, to which reference is made as the foundation of this statement, nor by any other of the Irish statutes, can I authenticate this position. So that there appears to have been at no time any parliamentary recognition of the hypothesis, which represented the king as the feoffee of the Pope in derogation of the royal supremacy. When, however, the king had determined to assert and establish his supremacy, in opposition to the Pope's usurped authority, there were not wanting numerous adversaries, and at the head of these was Archbishop Cromer. Meanwhile, an opportunity had been afforded for introducing into the Church a counteracting force in the person of a man, not inferior to the primate in moral and intellectual faculties, but whose 4 Abp. USSHER's Religion of the Ancient Irish, p. 115. History of Ireland, by THOMAS LELAND, D.D., vol. ii. p. 160. |