the distinctive marks by which God’s hand may be perceived regulating human affairs, this, says Barrow, in his noble sermon on a special Providence,[217] is one--“the wonderful strangeness of events compared with the ordinary course of things, or the natural influence of causes: when effects are performed by no visible means, or by means disproportionate, unsuitable, repugnant to the effect:”--and surely, when tried by such a criterion, nothing can furnish stronger evidence of a work which “was not of man but of God,” than the events which immediately preceded the Reformation, and the consequences which flowed from them. It might seem that a question concerning the king’s marriage was the most unlikely thing in the world to set this great cause in motion--yet such was the fact.--Henry, after living nearly twenty years with Katherine, felt, or affected to feel, scruples as to the lawfulness of marrying a brother’s widow. Whether the exception which was taken against the legitimacy of the Princess Mary by the French ambassador when the marriage between her and the Duke of Orleans came under discussion, was honestly made and did in reality open Henry’s eyes to a new view of his own position--whether Wolsey started the objections which unsettled the King’s mind, with the intention of serving his own ends by thwarting the Emperor the Queen’s nephew, and providing the King with a match more agreeable to himself--whether the death of the Queen’s untimely offspring with a single exception, did as he pretended, fill him with concern as the accomplishment of the Levitical law, “that if a man take his brother’s wife it is an unclean thing; they shall be childless;”[218]--or whether, on the other hand, he was weary of a wife whose ascetic devotions might seem to fit her more for a convent than a court, whilst her person, not attractive at best, was now rendered less so by increasing infirmities;--or, lastly, whether the charms of Ann Bullen had conjured up in him his strong sense of the sin he had committed in uniting himself with Katherine, as may be imagined without any great breach of charity of a man, whose conscience, upon other occasions, besides this, seems to have been singularly ill-timed in its suggestions--so it was, that a divorce was determined upon, and measures were adopted to carry the determination into effect. Opinions were divided; the sexes in general took opposite sides; but the learned themselves were not agreed--on the one hand, it was argued that the prohibition of such a marriage was clear in the Levitical law,[219] and such prohibition was not to be considered as confined to the Jews, for that the violation of it is expressly numbered among the sins of the Canaanites by which the land was polluted,[220] and therefore that it was of universal obligation; moreover, that John the Baptist declared of Herod, that it was “not lawful for him to have his brother’s wife;” that John, therefore, held