letter of the law, to stand in the gap; mass-priests, who could read their breviaries, and no more--for in those days men seem to have received ordination without any adequate examination either as to learning or character[123]--persons of the lowest of the people, with all the gross habits of the class from which they sprung; loiterers on the alehouse bench;[124] dicers, scarce able to say by rote their Pater-noster, often actually unable to repeat the commandments;[125] divines every way fitted to provoke the 75th canon, which was no doubt, in the first instance levelled against them.[126] Such were the ministers to whom was consigned a very large proportion of the parishes of England before the Reformation; with what effect, the ignorance, the superstition, the vices which then spread themselves over the whole country, sufficiently testify. A feature or two of the times, such as have been preserved to us, are here offered to the reader, not, to be sure, always drawn by a very friendly hand, but still, in all probability, tolerably faithful. The prayers of the church, being in Latin, tended little or nothing to edification. Preaching there was scarce any. Quarterly sermons appear to have been prescribed to the clergy, but not to have been insisted upon; for though mass was on no account left unsaid for a single Sunday, sermons might be omitted for twenty Sundays together, and nobody be blamed.[127] The unpreaching prelate is honest Latimer’s by-word. Indeed, as the Reformation approached, as the stirring of the foundations began to make itself felt; to be a preacher was to be suspected of being a heretic.[128] The friars, to be sure, were not dumb dogs, but they barked to little purpose, in a manner to prove rather that they were hungry than watchful; their discourses having for their object rather to fill their own wallets than satisfy their hearer’s wants, and if not occupied with uncharitable invectives against other ecclesiastics, a tissue of fables and old wives’ tales.[129] Catechising, in the protestant sense of the term, was unknown or unpractised. When, indeed, it was perceived how powerful a weapon it was in the hands of the Reformers, steps were taken at the council of Trent for putting forth what was called a catechism. But the Trent catechism was composed avowedly for the instruction of the parish priests, not for the use of children, to whom it was not at all adapted; and, after all, the gross ignorance of the former must have made it a dead letter to most of them; utterly unintelligible so long as it remained in the learned language in which it was written, and if translated, (as it was, into Italian, French, German and Polish, whether into English we know not,) still containing too much special pleading, too obvious an anxiety for secular interests, too manifest an apprehension that the “craft was in danger,” too much doubtful or ridiculous theology, to stand against the strong blows of the men of the new learning. The Church