religion which He taught, would ever propose to bring fire down from heaven or up from hell to consume the unbeliever. Such enormities in the doctrine and practice of the Church, as we have indicated rather than described, could lead to only one of two issues--Reform or Revolution. The change brought about, though contenting itself with the milder name, was in fact the more drastic procedure. The European reformation of Martin Luther in 1517 was a revolution in the Church, much more radical and much more worthy of so strong a designation than the political revolution of 1688 in Great Britain. It is needless to recapitulate the causes of offence; they were only too patent--insolence, secularity, sensuality, venality, idleness, vice, and worthlessness of every kind in the Church; but there were two causes which, in addition to corruption from within, tended to open the ears of Christendom largely to the cry for Church reform. These were the stir in the intellectual movement from the days of the author of the Divine Comedy downwards, enforced by the invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century, which was amply sufficient to become a danger to even a much less vulnerable creed than that which had satisfied the crude demands of medieval intelligence; and, in the second place, the hostility which the insolence and ambition of Churchmen had roused in the secular magistracy--that is, not only the monarch and his official ministers, but the great body of the higher nobility who found themselves ousted from their place in the familiar counsels of the monarch by the advocates and ambassadors of a foreign potentate. Thus the two best friends of every Established Church in its normal state were converted into enemies; and the natural indignation of the common people at the licentious lives and gross venality of the clergy was stimulated into an explosion by the desire of the secular dignities to curb the pride of the clergy, and, it might lightly happen also, to rob them of part of their overgrown wealth, nominally for the public good, really for the aggrandisement of the Crown and the nobility. The shameless nepotism of Pope Sixtus IV., the flagitious lives and abhorrent practices of the Borgias, more fit for a sensational melodrama in the lowest Parisian theatre than for the home of a Christian bishop; the military rage of a Julius, who turned the Church of Christ into a travelling camp and the bishop's crozier into a soldier's sword; the literary dilettantism of the Court of Leo X., more eager to distinguish itself by the elegant trimming of Latin versicles than by apostolic zeal and Christian purity,--all this, so long as it disported itself on Italian ground, the aristocracy of England and Scotland might have continued to look on with indifference; but that the son of anybody or nobody, in a county of unvalued clodhoppers, should jostle them in the antechamber of the monarch, and claim precedence in