opinion of an individual, or of a visionary; on the contrary, it was very generally entertained by men the most sober-minded. Archbishop Whitgift, in his appeal to Queen Elizabeth against the sacrilegious designs of the Earl of Leicester and others, challenges this as a truth “already become visible in many families, that church land, added to an ancient and just inheritance, hath proved like a moth fretting a garment, and secretly consumed both.”[258] Lord Burleigh, whose bias was rather that of the Puritan than of the Roman Catholic, cautioned Thomas, his first-born, not to build on an impropriation, as fearing the foundation might hereafter fail.[259] “I charge you,” was one of the three injunctions laid upon his son by Lord Strafford when under sentence of death, “touching church property, never to meddle with it; for the curse of God will follow all them that meddle with such a thing that tends to the destruction of the most apostolical church upon earth.”[260] And even Selden (no violent advocate of ecclesiastical dues) censures the alienation of tithes. “And let them remember,” he writes, “who says, ‘It is a destruction for a man to devour what is consecrated.’”[261] Indeed, during the latter half of the seventeenth century--whether from compunction--whether from the attention of the public having been directed to the subject by Archbishop Laud, and by popular treatises which made their appearance about that time--whether from the experience and notoriety of the evil, and the consequent shame it drew upon its abettors, or from whatever other cause--many impropriations were voluntarily relinquished, and a very considerable number of vicarages were more or less augmented.[262] Still there is no abuse out of which Providence cannot extract some good. This act of desecration (as it was considered) proved the safety, perhaps, of the yet tottering Protestant cause, under the reign of Queen Mary; for the great proprietors had violent scruples against returning to a form of faith which might entail upon them the surrender of their lands. And though it is probable that the religious establishment of this country, if it had stood at all, would have stood upon firmer ground at this moment, had the Reformation been completed (for it was left sadly imperfect), by the revision instead of the excessive alienation of the revenues of the church; yet, as affairs turned out, that very spoliation, perhaps, sustained the Church of England a second time, when the Puritan lay impropriators threw themselves in the way (whether consistently or not) of the abolition of tithes;[263] and more unlikely things have happened than that it should do the country the like good office again; for it would require a man of more intrepidity than even the disingenuous Neal (who walks over this incident more delicately than is his custom where there is room for a fling at the church) to draw a distinction between the lay and ecclesiastical tithe-holder, in