CHAPTER X.

Poor and degraded vicars, to recover their position, forced to threaten hell torments, and to attach efficacy to the sacraments-The nature and effects of Church Rationalism-Excuses and evasions, the sure marks of corrupted minds, attended with punishments-Vicars depending on bishops who ignore their wants-The duty of feeding vicars to make them satisfactory arising from one's wife and children being but his neighbours-Bishops enquiring after a vicar's poverty, or priests exposing crime by demanding confession, is contrary to Natural and Saving religion.—The rich man starving minister Lazarus.

A

S Henry VIII. had taken away every thing from the vicars, they picked up a bit of food and a rag of clothes the best way they could, and what they preached helped them to succeed. Their sermons. were continually about the tormenting flame of the fire and brimstone of hell. They described fully the burning lake, the never-dying worm, the horrible stench, and other miseries and tortures of the damned. They showed how the devil beats all in hell with a red hot poker, and sticks it through their body. They preached that he puts the damned under the burning lake in darkness, and that when they are nearly dead from cold he puts them into the big fire, so as to punish the warm Hottentots and the cold Icelanders. The punishment which, they latterly said, tortured the English most was pouring boiling water down their throat out of the devil's tea pot, when they were

68 The tricks resorted to by poor clergymen.

promised tea. They gave out lately that the devil pretends to give Irishmen whisky, when he throws it all over them, to make them catch fire, and to burn their thick skin the quicker in the flame.

The vicars were great favourites with the people, who believed they could preserve them by the sacraments from going to hell. When the feelings and passions of the people were well played-upon, they did not want any good or clever sermons at all. So the preaching turned into talking about politics, or such worldly things as pleased the fancy; and the sermons lasted but five minutes, and sometimes there was no sermon at all. This saved the vicars the expense of buying books to give them knowledge to compose sermons, for which they had no money. The following is the insurance-ticket of church-rationalism, which the vicars gave the people to please them, and to save themselves all trouble:-" Brethren," they preached, "God is too merciful to damn you, if you do your best. Your good works, alms, kindness, charitable feelings, and earnest effort to serve God, will go a good way. You are in the Holy Mother Church, and, therefore, you are quite safe. You are saved by this law or sect-branch of the Catholic Church, which you profess, for you were made all right and Christians by it at your baptism. The Catholic Church is the whole of Christendom-in fact everything-for the more religions we include in it the more Catholic or general it will be. It controls the thirty-nine articles of religion, one of which says, we are to be had accursed for saying we are saved by the sect (or church-branch) which we profess.' You are as safe

Popery producing ignorance and poverty.

69

in the Catholic Church as the unclean beasts were in Noah's Ark. These were saved from drowning as well as Noah himself. Attend to the church's teaching and to the church's rules, and you want no more."

This teaching is really heathenism, for all heathens believe that the mere observance of the forms of their religion helps their soul's salvation; and it is heathenism to make a man his own saviour, or to put a priest in God's place. By this preaching the people sank into a grovelling state. Popish countries are poorer, more miserable, and ignorant, than Protestant ones. Ireland and Italy are much more so than England and Scotland. Those who believe that they obtain salvation through faith in the blood of Christ, and that they grow better through the help of God's grace, and not by their works or priests, are a more superior and a more prosperous race, wherever they are found. Therefore, instead of imposing upon these people, or taking advantage of their reverential feelings, and of their readiness to believe a "priest," or instead of setting myself up as a Pope at their expense, I resolved to be so honest as to avoid heathen juggling. So I preached to them to reform all that was wrong in them, and to maintain me as God directs. I then took to my pulpit and preached as follows upon my family and bodily affairs:

Dear Brethren, cried I, in my native village the first preacher was Lord of the Manor. Now, when my poor old father, his tenant, was called to an account, for having stolen his fruit and property, and for having broken the terms of his lease, he excused himself, saying, "My Lord, it was not my fault, for it was

70

Every excuse comes from the Devil.

my wife who caused me to do wrong. If you had not married us it would not have happened." When my poor old mother was called to an account for her bad character and fall, she replied, saying, "I went wrong because you allowed that foreign black Prince to be at large, and to have so much of his own way. He beguiled me with his false logic, with his crafty cunning, and pretension, and I could not resist his promises and charms." When the black Prince, who is over our Lowlands, was called to an account, by my Lord Preacher, for having made my virtuous mother fall, and for having turned my father into a thief and traitor, he excused himself, saying," It is all on account of the hardness of my lot. It arises from my being turned out of thy good company and from being deprived of thy heavenly sermons." But my Lord Preacher replied, "Instead of owning your guilt, each one of you tries to deceive me by pretending that it was somebody else who did the evil. I curse and ruin each of you. O! man, thou shalt be a grave-digger, with thorns and thistles in thy side. O! woman, the pangs of hell shall get hold of thee in the flesh, and thou shalt be a mourner enslaved to another. O! wretched Prince of the power of the air, thy belly shall be all dust, and thou shalt never rise above it." (Genesis iii.) So I was born with the bad blood of my parents which corrupted me to become everything that is bad, even to be a fallen wretch, and a rebel.

My brethren, after this never make an excuse. Cattle-dealing kept one man from Christ, marriage another, and farming a third. (Luke xiv. 18-20). Excuses are the dust which the devil eats into lies.

Bishops lose all goodness by beholding defects. 71

I wish you to go and to remind the Archbishops and Bishops that they preach to you not to make the badness of the devil in you, or anything else whatever, an excuse for not doing good. Tell them that they should not make the poverty and the grovelling state of the vicars, or the worldliness of this country, an excuse for cutting them in society, and for keeping them in poverty and degradation, stuck to the ground, like the devil going on his belly and eating dust. God did not make the badness, insult, and high treason, of Adam and Eve an excuse for leaving them in their wretched state, for He gave them food, clothes, His presence, and a Saviour. Brethren, "put not your trust in princes nor in any child of man," (Psalm cxlvi.,) for each has his own little iron in the fire. Let your motto be, each man for himself, without being dependent upon Bishop or Priest, and Christ for us all. Here is a curious document for your church veneration for Antiquity.

"British Museum, Harleian MSS., No. 595, fo. 120. [Dated 1603].

"Answer of the Bishop of Norwich, to articles of enquiry from the Archbishop of Canterbury as to the state of Benefices within his Diocese.

"fo. 142. Flitcham.

Edw. Skevington, Clerk, Curate there, says,

"To the 1. ther be 60 Coicants. [Communicants]. The 2 and 3 ther be none;

To the 4th, 5, 6 and 7, the Church is impropriate, in the possession of Sir Edward Cooke, Knight, without any Vicarage endowed. He serveth the Cure and hath for his stipend £11 and his diet per annum.”