Historical Gleanings (Volume 2); A Series of Sketches Wiklif. Laud. Wilkes. Horne Tooke (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: is the subject of my Lecture, have left a deep impression on the social life of this country, and, through it, on the life of every civilised community. It is perfectly true, as the f1rst philosopher of history averred, that small acts are rather an index of current opinion than a cause of it. But a very small act may become indirectly the beginning of a powerful principle, which may exercise a vast latent influence, and may challenge attention only when it becomes an established motive, influencing the minds and acts of those whom it was never designed originally to affect. Up to the Reformation the Church of England was rich. From the middle of the fourteenth century many of its benefices and bishoprics were occupied by cadets of the aristocracy. It is said that Henry, afterwards the eighth king of that name, was destined for the Church and the English primacy as long as he was a younger son, and that we owe the interest which this monarch took in ecclesiastical matters to the fact that he escaped this profession, after receiving some training for it, only by the death of his brother Arthur. But on this side of that eventful period in which Henry broke away from the Roman Church, and impropriated so much of the revenues which had formerly belonged to ecclesiastics, the Church was depressed, poor, and uninviting. It is said that between the Reformation and the Revolution only one prelate of noble descent had sat on the bishop's bench. This was Compton, bishopof London, one of the seven who stood their trial in the last year of James the Second, and who made, for a time at least, episcopacy a popular power in Great Britain. The Revolution was followed by the schism of the Nonjurors in England, the establishment of Pres- byterianism in Scotland, and the Penal Code in Ireland....