assert that the incontinence of the clergy was extirpated! It had not been amended when the Council of Constance was held, and was not amended till the Reformation. At that crisis fear and danger and policy, and the zeal which is always exerted by party-spirit, united toʻ effect what the Council of Trent, like those of Pisa and Constance and Basil, would otherwise only have talked of effecting. A check was given to that open and audacious profligacy against which Hus did not lift up a louder voice than the most eminent of those cardinals and prelates who concurred in the guilt of his martyrdom. But the root of the evil was left, because the influential men, who perceived where it lay, dared not attempt the only effectual remedy. Gregory the Great is said to have been the first Pope who imposed this law upon the clergy, and when he perceived its injurious effects, he revoked the prohibition. His successors renewed and enforced it, because the consolidation of their own power was with *Lenfant, C. of Constance, ii. 359.-A letter from Ulric Bishop of Augsburg to Pope Nicholas I. is Lenfant's authority, and he refers for it to the Casauboniana, 302. A doubtful authority ascribes the first injunction of celibacy to Pope Siricius in the latter part of the fourth century.-Venema, Hist. Eccles. Christ. t. iv. § 177. p. 190. them paramount to all other considerations. You remember, Sir, the saying of Æneas Sylvius, that if there had formerly been good reasons for prohibiting the marriage of the clergy, there were now stronger ones for allowing it. It is a passage which Onuphrius suppressed in his edition of Platina's Lives of the Popes,* when that work was mutilated, as so many others have been, to make it suit the policy of the Romish Church. This was one of the opinions which that Pius Æneas changed upon his elevation to the Papacy. He then saw how expedient it was for the Court of Rome to favour the Monastic Orders, as its surest supporters, and therefore may have thought it dangerous. to offend them upon a point which would certainly have armed them against him. But though he thus learnt to consider the prohibition as politic, his clear perception of its effects upon the character of the clergy could not have been changed. Their character was such that Cardinal Zabarella, who bore so conspicuous a part in the Council of Florence,† said it would be better to repeal the prohibition than to tolerate its consequences. What those consequences have been in the most catholic *Lenfant, C. de Pise, i. 24. + Lenfant, C. of Constance, ii, 327, 359. country in Europe, a country where no open scandal was tolerated, and where the Holy Office was ready, in aid of ecclesiastical discipline, to take cognizance of the morals of the clergy, we know from that Practical and Internal Evidence against the Romish system which Mr. Blanco White has laid before the world. Better service has seldom been rendered to the Protestant cause than by that most valuable and seasonable work. These consequences were not unforeseen, and therefore the introduction of the injurious restriction was so long withstood. When, at the Council of Nice, it was proposed that the married clergy should no longer be allowed to cohabit with their wives, the Egyptian Bishop Paphnutius protested against imposing an obligation which it was certain that all could not observe, and which they could not endeavour to enforce without great injury to religion. Even the persons who made this unwise proposal yielded to the earnest and unanswerable reasoning of a prelate not more eminent for his sufferings in time of persecution, than for the unimpeached purity of his life; and the whole council* unanimously determined that the * Bingham, i. 5. § 7. Socrates Scholasticus, Hanmer's Translation, p. 232. clergy should be left at liberty, as they had always been. Eustathius was anathematized by the Council of Gangra, because he taught that men ought to separate from those priests who retained the wives whom they had married while they were laymen. The Council of Ancyra permitted deacons to marry after‡ ordination; and in St. Jerome's days there were Bishops who would not ordain any unmarried Jerome states this with horrors in a man. * Bellarmine is so perplexed by this inconvenient story, that he can find no better means of evading its force than by chusing to disbelieve it. In this he has been followed by Valesius in his notes upon this historian. A writer of the same communion, but of a different spirit, observes upon this.." Quelquesuns doutent de la vérité de cette histoire. Je crois qu'ils le font plûtôt dans la crainte qu'ils ont, que ce fait ne donne quelque atteinte à la discipline d'à présent, que parce qu'ils en aient quelque preuve solide."-Du Pin, t. ii. 318. Ed. 1690.-Bingham, ut supra. + Bingham, i. 5. § 8. + Ibid. § Pro nefas, episcopos sui sceleris dicitur habere consortes : si tamen episcopi nominandi sunt, qui non ordinant diaconos nisi prius uxores duxerint, nulli cælibi credentes pudicitiam : immo ostendentes quod sanctè vivant qui malè de omnibus suspicantur : et nisi pregnantes uxores viderint clericorum, infantesque de ulnis matrum ragientes, Christi sacramenta non tribuunt."-Tractatus in Vigilantium. Before the Reformation, it was the custom in many of the Swiss Cantons, that whensoever they received a new Pastor, they obliged him to take a concubine, for the sake of preserv Treatise, where he appears as little to advantage for wisdom as for wit and command of temper: but we learn from that Treatise that in the fifth century a testimony was borne against this demoralizing prohibition, against the worship of Saints and relics, and against offering prayers for the dead; and your Jerome (for Jerome of Prague is ours) is one of the witnesses by whom we prove that the corruptions of the Romish Church were opposed step by step in their progress; and that in every age there were some who in the spirit of truth pro.tested against them. That the apostolical doctrine has been preserved throughout all ages, even when that which calls itself the Universal and Apostolical Church was most corrupted, is a point rather of curiosity than of importance. The question "Where was our religion before Luther?" is best answered as Sir Henry Wotton ↑ answered it; it was to be found then where yours is not to be found now, in the written word of God."‡ This reply, which is as irrefragable as that word ing the honour of their own families.-Sleidan. Comment. lib. iii. quoted by Henry Wharton. Preservative against Popery, vol. i. 337. * Allix's Remarks on the Albigenses, p. 22. 24. Izaak Walton's Life of Wottou. The question was propounded playfully by a friendly priest, to whom even in that age, and at Rome, such a reply might be |