reader can easily give credit to, I must advise him to look into Popish countries, where he will discover that their clergy are to the full as rich, in proportion, as ever ours were here; a flagrant instance of which we have from a calculation taken from the great Duke of Tuscany himself, in his own dominions, wherein the priesthood were found to enjoy seventeen parts in twenty of the whole land; which, had it not been for the seasonable Statute, Mortmain, they would have possessed here.*

The reader will no doubt be curious to know how the spiritual societies came to possess such prodigious temporal estates. The first monks we read of were in the middle of the third century; men whom the persecution of the heathen emperors compelled to live in deserts, and who being, by a long course of solitude, rendered unfit for human society, choose to continue in their monastic way, even after the true cause of it ceased.

The example of these men was soon followed by a number of crazy devotees, who were so ignorant of true religion as to think that their way to heaven lay through wild and uninhabited deserts, and who finding that they had not charity enough to observe that precept of Christ, of "loving their neighbours as themselves," were resolved to have no neighbours at all; thereby frustrating the design of Christianity, which was to establish the good of society.

The next monks were a worthless set of wretches, who, having no way of making themselves famous in the world, retired out of it; where they reverenced idle ceremonies of their own institution, where they pretended conferences with angels, with the Virgin Mary, and even with God Almighty; not unlike Numa, the high priest of the heathen Romish Church, who abused the people with stories of his nightly interviews in a cave with the Goddess Egaria. At length, these holy cheats, to gain yet more veneration, began to practise on their bodies the most cruel severities till, at last, they were worshipped by the thoughtless mob as

*In our country. the monks received the vast revenues of "645 monasteries 90 colleges, 110 hospitals, 2,374 chanteries and free chapels." We may fairly affirm that the whole land that the monks were lords of, at the time of the Reformation, produced an annual income of at least £15,000,000.

saints, imitating, in some measure, the example of that heathen monk, Empedocles, who, to be thought a God, leapt into the burning mount Etna.

After this, designing men, who saw how great an influence these pretended saints had over mankind, took upon themselves the same exterior form of godliness, thereby not only to raise an empty name, as the former had done, but to enrich themselves at the expense of the deluded multitude. From hence flowed these many profitable religious maxims :-"That to give to the Church was charity towards God, and, as such, would atone for a multitude of sins, were they ever so heinous; That the Church was not the congregation of the Faithful, as St. Paul fancied it to be, but the body of the priests; that the priest-though ever so like the devil -was God's representative, and ought to be honoured as such; that there was such a place as Purgatory, and that the prayers of monks, like Orpheus's harp, were the only music that could mollify the tyrant of that place, who, being their very good friend, would release a poor soul at any time for their sake; that whispering all secrets in the ear of a priest was the only cure for a sick soul; that every priest had a power of pardoning all sins, except those only which were committed against himself; that indulgences purchased in fee could entitle a man and his heirs to merit heaven by sinning; and, lastly, that the priest could by virtue of a hocus pocus, quit scores with his Creator, by creating Him." These, and such like money-catching tenets, soon drew the whole wealth of the laity into the hands of those contemners of the world, and all its pomps and vanities; who not only flourished in Egypt and Italy, where they first sprang up, but were spread through all Christendom, and began quickly to vie in power and riches with the greatest monarchs, even in their own. territories, till, at last, kings and princes themselves were proud of becoming monks and abbots.

But not to amuse the reader with a long detail of the divers religious orders which swarm in other countries, I shall confine myself only to give some short account of the original rise and

There is a beast mentioned by Pliny, whose bite can only be cured by whispering in the ear of an ass. Vide J. Hale, of Auricular Confession.

progress of those that were established in this country; and these were the Benedictines, the Cluniacs, the Carthusians, the Cistercians, the regular Canons of St. Austin, the Praemonstratenses, the Gilbertines, Mathurines or Trinitarians, the Franciscans. the Dominicans, the Carmelites, and the Hermits of St. Austin.

The Benedictines.-The first of these that prevailed here was the Order of the Benedictines, whose rule was introduced into this nation by Augustine the Monk,* in the year of our Lord 596.

The founder of this Order was St. Bennet, who, in his own lifetime, erected twelve monasteries. The rules that this great saint left behind him (although the Papists affirm they were dictated by the Holy Ghost) are stuffed with the most trifling and superstitious ceremonies, and his whole seventy-three chapters contain but four wholesome precepts, two of which only, that relate to eating and drinking, his followers observe, neglecting the other two, which are the fundamentals of their Order, enjoining humility and poverty, for in his seventh chapter, St. Bennet assigns twelve degrees of humility for his monks to practise, which, how well they comply with, you may find by the humble titles of the Abbots of Mount Cassin, the head monastery of his Order, of which he himself was first abbot.

The titlest of the Abbots of Mount Cassin :-"Patriarch of the Sacred Religion, Abbot of the Sacred Monastery of Mount Cassin, Duke and Prince of all Abbots and Religious, Vice Chancellor of the Kingdom of both the Sicilies, of Jerusalem and Hungaria, Count and Governor of Campania and Terra de Lavoro, and of the Maritime Province, Vice Emperor and Prince of Peace.

In his fifty-ninth chapter, the same saint enjoins poverty to all his disciples, and in obedience to this rule, the before-mentioned monastery of Cassin so renounced the world as to be possessed of but "four bishoprics, two dukedoms, twenty counties, thirty-six cities, two hundred castles, three hundred territories, four hundred and forty villages, three hundred and six farms, twentythree seaports, thirty-three islands, two hundred mills, and one

* Dugdale and J. Babb, his English votaries.

+ Prosper Stellar de Mou. Cassin, fol. 404.

thousand six hundred and sixty-two churches." This was their holy poverty, and thus you may see how religiously these ten rules have been observed, and how spiritually the followers of St. Bennet retreated from the world in Italy, who were soon imitated in these kind of holy self-denials by their pious brethren here in England, as you may learn from the vast number of rich abbeys which the Benedictines were possessed cf. These were the humble priests from whom our gallant king, Henry II., received the discipline of eighty lashes, for having, like an undutiful son of the Church, dared to contend in power with their patron, Thomas á Becket, whose stirrup he had been obliged twice to hold whilst that meek prelate mounted.

As these monks began to be notorious to the world for obscenities and luxury, in the year of our Lord 912,* Oden, Abbot of Cluny, took upon him to correct their abuses, and gave rise to the Cluniacs, who were the same year translated by Alphreda, Queen of England, for who more proper to promote superstition than a zealous ignorant woman! However, to show how thoroughly those men reformed upon St. Bennet's followers, especially in point of humility, they were not settled one whole century before the Abbot of Cluny † contested the title of "Abbot of Abbots" with those of Mount Cassin.

The next Order was that of the Carthusians, first established in the year 1086, in the desert of Chartreuse, in Grenoble, by one Bruno, who was thereunto moved by hearing a dead man cry out three times, "That he was condemned by the just judgment of God," which was a very plain precept for building monasteries! This man professed to follow the rule of St. Bennet, adding thereunto many great austerities by way of reformation; amongst others he ordained that they ought to be satisfied with a very little space of ground about their cells, after which let the whole world be offered to them, they ought not to desire a foot more. This, I suppose, they have construed to signify a foot more than the whole world. For their cells, even in St. Barnard's time

* Petr. Ab. Clun. lib. 6, ep. 7.

+ Chron. Cassin., lib. 4, cap. 62.

Rulo 14; vide Hospin. de Omg. Mon., lib. 5, cap. 7.

became stately palaces, and their little spaces of ground stretched themselves into great tracts of land. They first settled themselves in England in the year 1180, and, in a very short time, had gained as much wealth, by their vows of poverty, as any other Order.

The Cistercians, so called from Citeaux, where they first assembled, and soon after admitted St. Bernard for their head (from whence they are styled Bernardines), were another reformation upon the Benedictines.*

St. Bernard himself founded one hundred and sixty monasteries, who, at first, would have no possessions, but lived by alms and the labour of their own hands; which, being too apostolic a life for monks, they soon grew as weary of poverty and industry as their neighbours, and in a little time rivalled those on whom they pretended to reform, in wealth, luxury, and wantonness, and such like monkish virtues. At their first institution they wore black habits, till the Virgin Mary, out of her great love to those fat friars, came down from heaven on purpose to reform their dress, as being the most essential part of their order.† She appeared herself to their Second Abbot, bringing a white cowl in her hand which she put upon his head, and, at the instant, the cowls of all the monks, then singing in the choir, were miraculously turned to the same colour. Thus did the Blessed Virgin change the habits of the Cistercians from black to white, as they had before altered their lives from a sad, melancholy retirement, to a merry, jovial society, black being no more fit for a jolly priest than white is for a mournful penitent. Besides the old monk, Satan, being represented as black, the Holy Virgin was unwilling perhaps that her friends should be like him in dress, though they resembled him in everything else. These locusts swarmed first in England, according to John Babb, about the year 1132, and continued here in the innocent exercise of their sancity, a remarkable instance of which was their poisoning of a good King, at Swineshead in Lincolnshire, an abbey of the Holy Cistercian order.

Dugdale Monasticon, vol. i., pp. 695, 699, 700.

† Ben. Gononus Chron. B. Virginis, p. 154.

Vide Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and Terrel's History of England.