Catechism, on the other hand, writ in our own mother tongue, brief, and, on the whole, of admirable simplicity; a manual which, elementary as it may be thought, no competent judge can examine without seeing that its authors must have been men mighty in those Scriptures, whereof, indeed, it is the essence, most patiently investigated, and most skilfully and scrupulously expressed; this wrought so effectually, that “now” (says an authority of the second year of Elizabeth, quoted by Strype) “a young child of ten years old can tell more of his duty towards God and man than a man of their bringing up can do in sixty or eighty years.”[130] Nay, of the Scriptures even the more learned clergy knew very little, the universities being taken up with popes’ laws and schoolmen. Indeed, it was difficult to meet with a copy of the Bible, or of any other profitable book of divinity in these seats of learning, so successfully had the friars bought them all up; and students, we are told, in the reign of Edward III. actually withdrew from them in consequence, and returned to their own homes;[131] nor does the study of the Scriptures appear to have had a chance against Scotus and Aquinas till Dean Colet established it at Oxford; and, about the same time, George Stafford, at Cambridge, by lectures on the books of Holy Writ.[132] The people at large, if possible, fared worse. They were debarred from all knowledge of their Bibles, either by the language in which they were written (for copies of Wickliffe’s translation were scarce), or, if not, by the price at which they were sold; the cost of Wickliffe’s New Testament, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, being four marks and forty pence, a sum equal to 2_l._ 16_s._ 3_d._ of present money.[133] Thus the multitude knew just so much of Scripture history, as the miracle plays taught them, and little more. To these burlesque and indecent caricatures of Holy Writ (though it is fair to say not so intended) the idle and the dissipated were the first to resort, as to fairs and revels, with which festivities, indeed, they ranked, so that, had they been better worth attention, it is probable that an attendance upon them would not have conduced much to edification. The Sabbath was rather a day of sports and pastimes than of devotion and instruction; of dancing, shooting with the bow, and practising with the buckler;[134] nor were these, it may be well imagined, the most culpable of its occupations. The churches were profaned. In the top of one of the pinnacles of St. Paul’s in London was Lollard’s tower, the prison, and often the grave of the saints. In the _arches_ of the same cathedral were the ecclesiastical courts, of which the balance was not always the balance of the sanctuary, though in the sanctuary it was held. In the spacious _nave_ was the exchange for the merchants (for Sir Thomas Gresham had not yet lived to remove the reproach), and the scene of all the