favour of the former; and to maintain that the right of the one is inviolable, because he does not observe the conditions upon which it was originally founded; whilst that of the other is nugatory, because he does. Certain it is, that the people were at first very reluctant to transfer the payment of tithes (which they had ever regarded, and which the law had ever taught them to regard, as inseparably connected with religious services,) to laymen;[264] and however it may be the fashion of our own times to spare the impropriator, and assail the clergymen, nothing is more true, than that it was not so from the beginning; but, on the contrary, that it was then thought no less an anomaly to pay tenths to the landlord, than it would now be thought so to pay fees for burials and baptisms to the squire. But it must be confessed that the Roman Catholic Church, owing to that entire selfsecurity from which she did not rouse herself till the Philistines were upon her, had in some measure to thank herself for the irreverence with which ecclesiastical property was now treated. Not twelve years before the great overthrow of the monasteries, the pope himself granted Wolsey a bull for the dissolution of several religious houses,[265] and the application of the funds to the erection and endowment of his colleges at Oxford and Ipswich; and, indeed, generally, by the diversion of estates from one ecclesiastical use to another, a process perpetually going on, often effected rather for individual advantage than for the public good, and often under circumstances of collusion and contrivance discreditable to all the parties concerned, a feeling of respect for the possessions of the church as exclusive and inalienable was weakened. The tendency of such a traffic (however confined to a privileged order) was to make the article itself looked upon in the light of merchandise, and to invite towards it the itching palms of the profane. And even, now amongst other advantages not, to be sure, unalloyed, which the law against simony in some degree secures--such as the less frequent purchase of livings at high prices, for which interest of money would be sought by an exaction of dues to the uttermost farthing, to the sure destruction of the pastoral character--such as the better chance hereby offered to meritorious men without influence, of finding a patron when the temptation he would be otherwise under to sell rather than give, is partly taken out of his way;--besides these advantages there is another, and not the least, in the skreen which it interposes between the church, and the market, and the total confusion which it prevents between the things of men and the things of God.