The progress of a cause, slow, of necessity by reason of the forms of the court, and the contradictions of the canons, was still further and more seriously impeded by appeals. By these, episcopal decisions were set at nought; and the more effectually as the court of the arches was invested with the power of suspending the process of the ordinary till the pope’s answer should be received, and often no doubt, till one or both of the litigants would be ready to exclaim with King Henry, whose divorce presents, in its seven years’ details, a splendid example of the grievances under which numbers of his subjects were suffering, with more right on their side-- ----“I abhor This dilatory sloth and tricks of Rome.” It would be a long labour, and one, perhaps of no great interest to the majority of our readers after all, to follow out this branch of our subject in all its extent. Suffice it, however, not to have passed over in silence so fruitful a source of popular discontent as abuses in the administration of the law--abuses which could fail of alienating multitudes from a church with which they were identified. It is not, perhaps, a circumstance less worthy of notice from being often overlooked, and whilst the more obvious evils which clamorously demanded redress are set forth to the full, one which touched men in their property, their affections--which met them in the affairs of “this working-day world” at every turn--is noticed casually, or not at all. There may be those, indeed, who think that to dwell at so much length on the secondary and more disgraceful causes of the Reformation, is to detract from the character of that great event, and to tarnish its lustre; but they who regard God’s enemies as his instruments will not so account of it. They will see in the course given to those beggarly elements the same superintending hand that wrought the nourishment of Jacob’s household out of the sin of Jacob’s sons; so that whilst they wickedly sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites, God mercifully made it for good, sending him before them, by this means, to preserve them a posterity in the earth, and to save their lives by a great deliverance. They will see in it the same power at work that shaped the cruel decree of Pharaoh for the children to be cast into the river into an easy provision for bringing up Moses in the royal household, and thus fitting him to be the teacher and leader of Israel, by introducing him into all the wisdom of the Egyptians. They will see in it the same that achieved the salvation of the world itself, by Caiphas who declared that it was expedient for one man to die for the people, and by the wretches that cried, “Crucify him! crucify him!” CHAPTER IV. MONASTERIES.--THEIR USURPATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE CLERGY.--IMPROPRIATIONS.--EVILS OF THE SYSTEM.