Christ, and his church the great sorceress that made drunk the nations with the cup of her enchantments. What business then had they with the papal doctrine, that the heathen were given to the believers as a possession? The Pope declared that, as the representative of the Deity on earth, he claimed the world, and disposed of it as he pleased. But the Protestants protested against any such assumption, and appealed to the Bible; and where did they find any such doctrine in the Bible? Yet Elizabeth of England, granted charters to her subjects to take possession of all countries not yet seized on by Christian nations, with as much implicit authority as the Pope himself. It is curious to hear her proclaiming her intimate acquaintance with the Scripture, and yet so blindly and unceremoniously setting at defiance all its most sacred precepts. "I am supposed," said she, in her speech on proroguing parliament in 1585, "to have many studies, but most philosophical. I must yield this to be true, that I suppose few that are not professors, have read more; and I need not tell you that I am not so simple that I understand not, nor so forgetful that I remember not; and yet, amidst my many volumes, I hope God's book hath not been my seldomest lectures, in which we find that which by reason all ought to believe."
It had been well if she had made good her boasting by proving practically that she had understood, and had not forgotten the real doctrines of the Christian code. But Elizabeth, as well as her father, was, in every respect, except that of admitting the Pope's supremacy, as thorough a Catholic as the best of them; and we see her granting to Sir Humphrey
