Established Church by acts that must have been profoundly offensive to every pious person who retained his ancestral faith. Thus, for instance, we find as early as the days of Wycliffe that a gentleman of Wiltshire, who had received the sacramental bread from his parish priest, took it home and lunched upon it with wine, oysters, and onions.[1] Under Henry VIII. and Queen Mary, acts which we can only designate as deliberate outrages upon the Church of the majority, were extremely common. Sometimes it was a crucifix—the symbol to ordinary men of their Lord's death and suffering—that was carried off and burned or broken up; sometimes a cat in priest's robes was hanged, or the priest parodied behind his back while he was officiating in the sacred mysteries; very constantly the consecrated bread of the Eucharist was ostentatiously seized and trampled under foot, or given for food to a dog.[2] In short, the more hotheaded of the English Reformers were guilty of deliberate acts which it is possible a Hell-fire Club would have shrunk from two centuries later;[3] and though the intemperance of the Reformers was palliated by the sincerity of their convictions, and their readiness to seal them with their blood, it is certain that much which they did would be punished in any civilised State as sacrilege. No
- ↑ Walsingham's Historia Anglicana, vol. i. pp. 450, 451.
- ↑ See Maitland's chapters on the Ribalds of the Reformation, and specially pp. 242, 252, 254, and 291, 293.—Maitland's Reformation in England.
- ↑ The worst acts imputed to the monks of Medmenham who may appropriately be termed a Hell-fire Club are, I believe, the invocation of the devil by Lord Sandwich, the giving the sacrament to a dog by the same worthy, and a picture in which a naked Venus was represented as "mater sanctorum," excesses which were meant to be private, and acts, however scandalous, which were probably much less offensive to the apathetic religion of those times than the acts of the reforming ribalds to the more pious among their countrymen.—Rae's Wilkes, Sheridan, and Fox, pp. 13, 134; |Dilke's Papers of a Critic, vol. ii p. 233.
