Henry proved himself an apt scholar in the lessons which the incautious, not to say unlawful, practice of the church of Rome taught him. And so successfully had he overcome all primitive notions of the honour due to sacred things, that even before the dissolution, he seems to have converted many monasteries into stables; a scandal of which honest Latimer did not fail to remind him publicly; conceiving it a monstrous thing; that “abbeys, which were ordained for the comfort of the poor,” should be kept for the king’s horses; nor convinced of the contrary by the nobleman (who seems to have been ripe to become an impropriator, as very likely he did) who said to him, “What hast thou to do with the king’s horses?--horses be the maintenance and part of a king’s honour and also of his realm; wherefore, in speaking against them, ye are speaking against the king’s honour.”[266] Cranmer was not (as may be well believed) an unconcerned spectator of this great revolution in the possessions of the church; but though he agreed with Cromwell in the desire of the dissolution, he differed from him with regard to the application of the proceeds. Indeed, the views they respectively took of the nature of ecclesiastical property do not appear to have coincided. The one was rather acting in a political, the other in a religious spirit. Cromwell was concerned to right the monarchy, Cranmer to save a church. The former was for the suppression of the religious houses, because the supremacy of the crown could not be otherwise secured; the latter had this for his object too, but still more the annihilation of the abuses of purgatory, masses for the dead, saint-worship, and pilgrimage, of all which the abbeys were the incorrigible patrons. So far, therefore, they went hand in hand. But in the disposal of the vast fund which accrued from the confiscation of the church estates, Cranmer did not, like Cromwell and the parliament, regard it as a matter for the king to take his pastime with, according to his own mere will and motion.[267] Nor would he dissipate, nor did he think it lawful to divert from its original destination, and that the promotion of God’s glory, so ample a revenue, and make it over at once, and for secular purposes only, to the crown. He, therefore, was for considering it as still a sacred treasure, to be applied to sacred ends; and out of the old and corrupted monasteries he was desirous to see arise new and better foundations: houses attached to all the cathedrals, to serve as nurseries for the clergy of the diocese in religion and learning; an addition made to the incomes of the inferior class;[268] and the number of sees increased, with a corresponding diminution in their extent, that the bishop might be in deed as well as in name the overseers.[269] To these wise and good propositions Latimer added another, no less commendable, that a few of the greater abbeys should be left for pious and charitable uses. For the priory