We call the disillusionists, the Reformers; but Fish describes them as
men of greate litterature and iudgement that for the love they haue vnto the trouth and vnto the comen welth haue not feared to put theim silf ynto the greatest infamie that may be, in abiection of all the world, ye[a] in perill of deth to declare theyre oppinion.… p. 10.
Undoubtedly Henry personally was the secular Apostle of the first phase of our Reformation. The section of doctrinal Protestants was politically insignificant: and it may be fairly doubted whether the King could have carried the nation with him, but that in the experience of every intelligent Englishman, the cup of the iniquity of the priesthood was full to overflowing. He was aided by the strong general reaction of our simple humanity against the horrid sensuality, the scientific villany offered to it by the supposed special agents of Almighty GOD in the name of, and cloaked under the authority believed to have been given to them from the ever blessed Trinity.
Morality is the lowest expression of religion, the forerunner of faith. No religion can be of GOD which does not instinctively preassume in its votaries the constant striving after the highest and purest moral excellence. It is an intolerable matter, beyond all possible sufferance, when religion is made to pander to sensuality and extortion. How bitter a thing this was to this barrister of Gray's Inn, may be seen in the strange terms of terror and ravin with which he characterizes these "strong, puissant, counterfeit holy, and idle beggars." To the untravelled Englishman of Henry VIII's reign, "cormorants" must have meant some like devouring griffins, and "locusts" as a ruthless irremediable and fearful plague without end. By such mental conceptions of utter desolation, impoverishment and misery does our Author express the bitterness of the then proved experience by Englishmen, of the combined hierarchy and monkery of Rome.
All which is for our consideration in estimating the necessity and policy of the subsequent suppression of the monasteries.
These representations are also some mitigation of what is sometimes thought to be the Protestant frenzy of our great Martyrologist, whose words of burning reprobation of the Papal system of his time seem often to us to be extravagant; because, by the good providence of GOD, we are hardly capable of realizing the widespread and scientific villany of the delusions and enormities against which he protested.
