assembled, devising remedies as fast as time breedeth mischief; and contrariwise, the ecclesiastical state should still continue upon the dregs of time, and receive no alterations now for these five-and-forty years and more? If it be said to me, that there is a difference between civil causes and ecclesiastical, they may as well tell me that churches and chapels need no reparations, though castles and houses do; whereas commonly, to speak truth, dilapidations of the inward and spiritual edifications of the Church of God, are in all times as great as the outward and material. To my Lords the Bishops I say, that it is hard for them to avoid blame (in the opinion of an indifferent person) in standing so precisely upon altering nothing; laws not refreshed with new laws, wax sour. Without change of ill, a man cannot continue the good. To take away many abuses supplanteth not good orders, but establisheth them. A contentious retaining of custom is a turbulent thing as well as renovation. A good husbandman is ever pruning in his vineyard or his fields; not unrea

sonably indeed, not unskilfully, but lightly; he findeth ever somewhat to do."

Little

Another circumstance well worthy of consideration is, that the times in which the Reformers lived were far from being favourable to the execution of their work. could be done during the reign of Henry the Eighth; it is astonishing that so much was effected. That tyrannical monarch had separated from the pope, but not from popery. The protestant who dared to deny the real presence in the sacrament, was no less the object of his displeasure, than the papist who ventured to question his supremacy. To proceed too fast or too slowly in the work of reformation equally excited his indignation; to fall short of, or to surpass the royal standard of orthodoxy, was alike punished by this modern Pro

crustes.

Edward's accession to the throne removed various obstacles from the path of the Reformers. Still, however, the reign of a minor was ill adapted for the completion of their great undertaking. The principal

ministers of state were indeed zealous in the cause; but the unhallowed motives by which these powerful auxiliaries were actuated, had a direct tendency to cast a stigma on the Reformation itself, and even to invest the suffering Romanists with the honourable title of religious confessors. It was evidently a desire to appropriate to their own use the spoliations of the Church, and not a zeal for its purification, which actuated a large majority of these pseudo-reformers. Had indeed the life of Edward been prolonged, he would have afforded unimpeachable and efficient aid. "We would not," said he, "have our subjects so much to dislike our judgment, so much to mistrust our zeal, as though we either could not discern what were to be done, or would not do all things in due time. God be praised, we know both what by his word is meet to be redressed, and have an earnest mind, by the advice of our privy council, with all diligence and convenient speed so to set forth the same, as it may most stand with God's glory, and edifying and quietness

of our people." Young as he was, he had drawn up with his own hand an outline for completing the Reformation, but his untimely death rendered all his pious intentions abortive; and during the short reign of his successor, the whole nation, with the exception of a little band of confessors and martyrs, relapsed into popery.

Several years elapsed after the accession of Elizabeth before the church reverted to the state in which it was left at the death of her brother. By her directions the ecclesiastical habits enjoined by the first book of King Edward, and proscribed by the second, were restored, and a rubric at the end of the Communion Service, against the notion of our Lord's "real and essential presence in the sacrament," was omitted; the queen being anxious that this subject should be considered as a speculative and undetermined opinion, in which every one was left to the freedom of his own mind. Such indeed was her attachment to a variety of popish ceremonies, that numbers of Roman Catholics conformed for years to the esta

blished church. Even the pope intimated his willingness to sanction the Anglican Liturgy and the administration of the Lord's Supper in both kinds, provided the queen would acknowledge his supremacy. But that imperious sovereign, in whose estimation popery or protestantism appears to have been little else than an engine of state policy, whilst she rejected the compromising overtures of the pope, strenuously opposed any further innovations in religion, lest they should ultimately be found no less than popery itself to trench upon her own prerogative and ecclesiastical supremacy.

To James the First we are indebted for the present translation of the bible-a boon which ought ever to endear his memory to protestants. But his inveterate dislike to the puritans, who were unhappily foremost in the request for a revision of our services, decidedly prejudiced him against the adoption of any alterations which might increase the influence or even soothe the prejudices of that party. "I peppered them," said the king, alluding to his conference with the