III. Many causes contributed, toward the middle of the seventeenth century, to favour the disorganisation and decay of scholastic learning; but, above all, the outbreak of the Civil War, and the consequent disorder, depression, and inquietude, seem to have reduced the educational standard, and to have thrown the task of instruction, in a great number of cases, into the hands of the clergy, from the want of funds or the lack of inclination to support the former lay-teachers. The acute political crisis, which lasted without interruption from 1640 to the commencement of the Protectorate in 1653, affected even the ancient academical and civic endowments; and the two Universities, the noble foundations of Edward VI., and the public seminaries instituted in London and other great centres by private munificence, suffered a common paralysis. The alliance between the Church and the schools was one formed or developed at a period of exceptional difficulty and pressure; but even when the immediate necessity for such a bond existed no longer, and affairs in England had returned to their normal state, the clergy saw too clearly the importance of the hold which they had gained on the national training and thought to allow education to pass back, farther than was avoidable, under lay control. In the time of the Commonwealth, and when Cromwell assumed the supreme authority, there were all over the country, throughout England and Wales, men in holy orders and in the enjoyment of benefices who combined with their sacerdotal functions, as many do still, the duties of schoolmasters and lecturers. Doubtless, among them there were some fairly qualified for the trust which they received and undertook; but the majority is alleged, in an authentic official document before me of 1654, to have been far otherwise. This State-paper is called "An Ordinance for the Ejection of Scandalous, Ignorant, and Insufficient Ministers and Schoolmasters," and was published in the autumn of the year above named. Two singular features it unquestionably possesses: the intimate association between the parson and the pedagogue, and the striking picture which it presents to our view of the lax and profligate condition of the class which Cromwell and his advisers saw thus clothed with the twofold responsibility of mental and spiritual tuition.