tended by Sir Robert Morley, lieutenant of the Tower, walked up undaunted to the place of hearing. The archbishop accosted him with an appearance of great mildness; and having cursorily run over what had hitherto passed in the process, told him, he expected, at their last meet-ing, to have found him sueing for absolution; but that the door of reconciliation was still open, if reflection had yet brought him to himself. I have trespassed against you in nothing (said the high-spirited nobleman): I have no need of your absolution. He then knelt down, and lifted up his hands to Heaven, breaking out into this pathetic exclamation, I confess myself before thee, O eternal God, to have been a great, a grievous sinner. How often have irregular and ungoverned passions misled my youth! How often have I been drawn into sin by the temptations of the world!Here absolution is wanted.--O my God, I humbly ask thy mercy. He then rose up, with tears in his eyes, and strongly affected with what he had just uttered, turned to the assembly, and stretching out his arm, cried out with a loud voice, Lo, these are your guides, good people. For the most flagrant transgressions of God's moral law, was I never once called in question by them. I have testified my disapprobation of their arbitrary appointments and traditions; and they treat me, as they have done others, with the most extreme severity. But let them remember the denunciations of Christ; All shall be fulfilled.

The grandeur, dignity, and vehemence with which he spoke, threw the court into some disorder. The force of truth, and his energetic manner, might possibly make some impression on the calcareous hearts of a few even of the bigotted ecclesiastics who surrounded him. The primate attempted an awkward apology for his treatment of him, and then suddenly turning to him, asked, what he thought of the paper which had been sent to him the day before? and particularly, what he thought of the first article, with regard to the holy sacrament? My faith with regard to the holy sacrament, (replied Lord Cobham) is, that Christ sitting with his disciples, the night before he suffered, took bread: and blessing it, brake it, and gave it to them, saying, Take, eat, this is my body which was given for you: do this in remembrance of me.—' -This is my faith, Sir, with regard to the holy sacrament; I am taught this faith by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul.

The archbishop now told him, that he had spoken many things which dishonoured the whole body of the clergy, and which naturally tended to bring them into contempt with the common people. We have already (said he) spent much time about you, and it appears all to be in vain. We must, therefore, come to some conclusion. Take your choice of this alternative; submit obediently to the ordinances of the church, or endure the consequence.-My faith is fixed (answered Lord Cobham aloud): do with me what you please. The archbishop then stood up,

took off his cap, and read aloud the censure of the church. Lord Cobham answered, with great cheerfulness, You may condemn my body: my soul, I am well assured, you cannot hurt. He then turned to the people, and stretching out his hands, said with a loud voice, Good Christian people, for God's sake, be well aware of these men; they will otherwise beguile you, and lead you to destruction. When he had said this, he fell on his knees, and raising his hands and eyes, prayed God to forgive his enemies; after which he was sent back to the Tower.

Lord Cobham remained six months in the Tower, without the archbishop and his clergy having come to any resolution; and he saved them the trouble of any further deliberations about him, by escaping out of the Tower by unknown means. He took the advantage of a dark night, evaded pursuit, and arrived safe in Wales; where some of the chiefs of that country favoured the noble fugitive.

In the mean time, the noble Cobham still continued an exile in Wales, though frequently obliged to shift the place of his retreat; and in that mountainous country he was four years sheltered from the malice of his enemies. Whilst, therefore, he imagined himself secure from his enemies, he was suddenly taken, carried to London in triumph, and put into the hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Things being circumstanced in this manner, Lord Cobham might easily foresee his fate; which, indeed, did not long remain in suspense. He received sentence of death, both as a heretic and a traitor. And on the day appointed for his execution, he was brought out of the Tower with his arms bound behind him, and having a very cheerful countenance. He was then placed upon a hurdle, and drawn upon it into St. Giles's fields, where they had set up a new gallows. When he arrived at the place of execution, and was taken from the hurdle, he devoutly fell down upon his knees, and prayed to GoD to forgive his enemies. He then stood up, and addressing the multitude, exhorted them to continue in the steadfast observance of the laws of GoD, as delivered in the Scriptures. Having added to this some other exhortations to the people, he submitted himself to his fate, with the intrepidity of a hero, and the resignation of a Christian. He was hung up alive by the middle with iron chains, on the gallows which was erected; under which a fire being made, he was burnt to death.

The rage of superstition was carried to such a height, that the Monks and Priests who attended, did not refrain from curses and execrations, even whilst the noble victim was in the flames; and they also endeavoured to prevent the people who surrounded from praying for him. Such was the end of the illustrious Cobham! and such the treatment which he received, by the contrivances, and at the instigation, of a set of men, who pretended to be Ministers of the Gospel of Peace!

Wiclif's Communion Table at Lutterworth.

THE errors and abuses of the church of Rome, had been accumulating for a thousand years, when they brought such scandal on religion, that any one who had the courage to assail them was sure to have numerous followers. Many had started, but under the odious name of Heretics they were soon suppressed by the joint civil and ecclesiastical power, and some of them, according to the early chronicles, suffered at the stake without contemporaneous pity, and almost without notice.

Previously to Wiclif, satirists and poets had descanted with great freedom upon the corrupt views and scandalous lives of the Romish clergy. This was a favourite theme of the tale-writers of the twelfth -and thirteenth centuries. But the court of Rome was not speedily alarmed at these freedoms. She reposed with a generous confidence upon the folly and blindness of mankind. Disquisitions, arguments, satires, and sonnets, seem to the uninstructed eye things of so airy and impotent a nature, that experience alone leads to their being regarded with suspicion. Men who wield the formidable sanctions which civil or ecclesiastical governments engender, are always inclined to view the meagre and solitary student, who has no engine but his pen, with an eye of contempt.

There was, however, a race of men to whom the court of Rome was by no means inclined to extend the same toleration which she granted to the solemn doctor and the airy satirist: these were the heretics of the WORTHIES, No. 6.

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twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The most memorable families of this tribe were the Waldenses and the Albigenses. The former appear to have been merely melancholy enthusiasts. Endeavouring to reduce. Christianity to its original standard, they insisted that the rich among them should sell all they had and divide with the poor, and required their clergy to be illiterate, poor, and destitute, like the fishermen who first taught the religion of Jesus. They were distinguished by the wretchedness of their apparel, an austere countenance, and an emaciated frame; and, if any were allowed to bear the name of their sect without submitting to these rigours, they served to swell the numbers of the party, but were abmitted only into its subordinate and less reputable classes.

The Albigenses, with the same exterior features of character, were materially distinguished from the Waldenses by the articles of their creed. They derived their descent from the Gnostics of the primitive ages of Christianity. They held that the material world was the work of an inferior divinity, the whole of whose proceedings were in opposition to the pure spirit, the elder and supreme God. They maintained that Jesus Christ assumed the similitude alone of a human body, and only seemed to have expired on the cross. From their fundamental principle of the stubborn and rebellious qualities of matter, they deduced a multitude of arguments in favour of the maceration of the flesh, and the mortification of the most innocent desires of man.

The court of Rome felt an animosity against these sects, not in proportion to the danger they menaced to the fabric of civil society, but measured by the contrast they afforded to the corruption and degeneracy of the established church. The heretics were not more extravagant in their attempts to introduce a savage and comfortless mode of existence, than the court of Rome was in its pride, arrogance, luxuriousness and venality. The austerities too of the heretics, however ridiculous they may be in our eyes, were exactly fitted to seize the imagination, and procure the applause, of the men of their own times. Accordingly, the progress of their tenets was rapid, and nobles and princes were forward to declare themselves their abettors. On the other hand, the hostility of the Roman pontiff was expressed in no equivocal language or temporising proceedings. His measure was a crusade; and his machine the inquisition, which was expressly invented for this occasion. So bloody a war as that carried on by Simon de Montfort at the head of the 'crusaders of Languedoc, and St. Dominic who led the tribunals for the detection of heretical pravity, is scarcely elsewhere to be found in the history of the world.

Such was the state of actual power and of heretical innovation in the church of Rome, previously to the enterprises of Wiclif. This celebrated reformer appears deeply to have meditated his plan before he com

menced his career.

He attacked no mere outposts of the church, as had been done by St. Amour, Fitzalph and Grossteste. His conceptions were cast in a very different mould from those of the heretics of the preceding centuries. The extravagances of the Gnostics, the Manicheans, and a hundred other sects into which the church had been rent, were such as to have brought the name of innovation in doctrine into contempt. Had Wiclif imitated their example, his efforts for reformation would have experienced a fate similar to theirs.

All that he taught was bold, manly, and strongly conceived, but perfectly simple. He opposed the supremacy of the pope. He saw no authority in reason or in Scripture, by which the referring the whole sovereign power over the church of Christ to one centre, the bishop and court of Rome, could be vindicated. He exposed in glowing colours the infinite multitude of usurpations which had grown out of this spurious principle. Penances, pardons, licenses to infringe a positive institution, masses for the dead, and works of supererogation constituting a bank of merit to be arbitrarily disposed of for the benefit of the living, he held up to that contempt with which, employed as they were for occasions to the vilest abuses, they have been viewed by all sober men from his time to the present. He saw in them a traffic rendering the court of Rome the most venal and unprincipled then existing on the face of the earth, and a means of slavery reducing its votaries to a state of mind the most feeble, pitiable, and abject. He did not scruple to denominate this mighty fabric of superstition Antichrist, and to affirm that the pope was that" man of sin" of whom St. Paul and St. John prophesied in the sacred writings. The object toward which his desires were directed was to vindicate every Christian into" the liberty with which Christ had made us free,” invigorated by enquiry and instruction, and accustomed to consult only his own judgment and conscience.

The prelacy, such as he saw it in his times, was to Wiclif another object of animosity and invective. Bishops during the dark ages had been gradually rising into the condition of temporal princes. They grasped the sword with that hand which should have been devoted to the crosier, and frequently exhibited themselves, cased in steel, in the midst of the field of war. Wiclif was an unrelenting enemy to the luxury and ostentation of the heads of the church. The object he had at heart was the establishment of a preaching clergy, not the instruments of a foreign power, not debauched by opulence and state, but who, reviving in their own persons the simplicity and ingenuousness of the apostolic times, should feel no incentive to mislead and trample upon those whom they were bound to cherish, to instruct and reform. He inveighed against the exemption of the priesthood from secular jurisdiction, and urged the necessity of putting them upon a footing with the