morals, particularly of the clergy, to whom he attributes every vice, natural and unnatural, which at any time has disgraced, and even destroyed human nature; and then he demands, with unparalleled boldness, whether Leo X. will put up with such abominations; and whether he will both see and suffer such horrid abuses and profanations; at the same time advising him strenuously to oppose himself to this torrent of corruption, and check at once the overflowing luxury, the growing ambition, and wanton dissipations that result from extensive simony and profane traffic.

In such strains of invective, of expostulation and warning, did this eminent man labour to ward off the storm which every wise man plainly saw was gathering thick above them. The patient pontiff listened to and approved, but unhappily disregarded, the wholesome counsel; till the storm burst, and overwhelming, in one sweeping deluge, some of the best portions of Christendom, let loose upon all the ancient and venerable establishments of religion a host of unruly and daring spirits, whose zeal could not wait coolly to calculate upon consequences, nor to discriminate between a depraved discipline and a sacred rite,-between what they themselves but a short time before had deemed the undoubted truths of the Gospel, and the obvious innovations of corrupt and ambitious men. And yet some have thought, and per

haps justly, that the early Reformers did but half finish the work they so successfully begun.

Of the immediate causes that led to the Saxon and German Reformation, I will treat hereafter : at present it is proper to remark, that not any of the writers I have alluded to, not even the most profligate and satirical, seem ever to have meditated an attack on the Doctrines of the universal Church. It was against the relaxed discipline, against the ambition and the vices of the Clergy, and the almost general backsliding of the people, that they directed their arguments or their reproaches.

Not any one of these persons enlisted under the banners of the Augustine Friar, Martin Luther, when with the most daring freedom he entirely departed from the Catholic Church, and sought not to reform, but to revolutionize the principles of his ancestors and brethren. The most violent advocate of Reform would have trembled and shrunk back with horror at a proposal to dethrone the holy Pontiff, to question the purity of the Church in regard to her doctrines, or the validity and usefulness of the ancient discipline; nor, indeed, did the Lutheran Reformers themselves, in the first instance, attack any of the received and sacred dogmas of the Church. It was not till they were emboldened by success, or irritated by opposition, that they presumed to lay the axe to

the root, or even to aim a single blow at the supremacy of the Pope, or the infallibility of the Church.

Concerning the real sentiments and intentions of the friends of Reform, Bossuet writes thus: Protestants cite to us St. Bernard, who, enumerating the Church's grievances, and those she suffered from heresies in her progress, and those she was exposed unto in latter days by the depravation of manners, allows them to be far more dreadful, because they taint the .very vitals, and spread infection through all the members of the Church: whence, concludes this great man, the Church may truly say with Isaiah, her most painful and most grievous bitterness is in peace;' when left in peace by infidels, and unmolested by heretics, she is most dangerously assaulted by the depraved manners of her own children. Even this were enough to shew, that he does not, like our Reformers, bewail the errors the Church had fallen into, (on the contrary, he represents her as secure on that side) but such evils only as proceeded from relaxed discipline. Accordingly, when instead of discipline, the church's dogmata were attacked by turbulent and restless men, such as Peter de Bruis, as Henry, as Arnold of Bresse ; this great man would never suffer their weak

* Variations, i. 4—6.

H

ening, so much as one of them, but fought invincibly, as well for the faith of the Church, as for the authority of her prelates.

"The case is the same with the rest of the Catholic doctors, who, in the succeeding ages, lamented abuses, and demanded a reformation of them. Of all these the most renowned is Gerson, and none more loudly called for it in the Church's head and members. In a sermon he made after the Council of Pisa before Alexander V., he introduces the Church, requesting of the Pope the reformation and re-establishment of the kingdom of Israel; but to shew he complained of no error, that could be observed in the Church's doctrine, he addresses the Pope in these words: Why do you not send to the Indians, whose faith may easily have been corrupted, they not being united to the Church of Rome, whence certainty of faith must be derived?' His master, Cardinal Peter d'Ailly, sighed also for a reformation; but the principle he went upon was far different from that of Luther, who, writing to Melancthon, gave it for a maxim, that sound doctrine could not subsist whilst the Pope's authority subsisted' whereas, this Cardinal was of opinion, that the members of the Church being separated from their head, during the schism, and there being no administrator and apostolical director, namely, no Pope, that all the Church acknowledged, it was not to be hoped

that a reformation could be well brought about.' Thus one made the reformation to depend on the subversion of the Papacy; the other, on the perfect re-settling of that sacred authority, which was established by Jesus Christ on purpose to keep up unity among his members, and withhold all in their respective duties."

Indeed, the Catholic Reformers, for so it may be convenient to distinguish them, never once thought of asserting, that any thing could "be wrong in the faith or worship of the Church;" nor did they ever so much as attempt to shake the foundations of that authority, which they at all times supposed "the Church, her supreme pastor, and her prelates, received from Christ," and which, they firmly maintained, could never be altered or impaired, though as we have already seen, they are free enough to "admit, that when Luther first made his attack on the Church of Rome, much reformation in the Church, both in respect to its head and members, was wanting in discipline and morals."*

I close with regret this feeble sketch of what the Germans would call Reformationis ante Reformationem, a well-written history of which, as Mr. Butler very justly remarks, is much

* Butler's Revolutions of the Germanic Empire, p, 87, 2d ed.

+ Ibid.