signs of Wolsey; instead of taking away from the church the lands of
the abbeys, they were desirous of seeing those lands transferred to the
high and true interests of religion. They wished to convert the houses
into places of education, and to reform, wherever possible, the
ecclesiastical bodies themselves.[522] This, too, was the dream, the
"devout imagination," as it was called, of Knox, in Scotland, as it has
been since the dream of many other good men who have not rightly
understood why the moment at which the church was washed clean from its
stains, and came out fresh robed in the wedding-garment of purity,
should have been chosen to strip it of its resources, and depose it from
power and preeminence. Cranmer, on the other hand, less imaginative but
more practical, was reluctant that clerical corporations should be
continued under any pretext--even under the mild form of cathedral
chapters. Cranmer desired to see the secular system of the church made
as efficient as possible; the religious system, in its technical sense,
he believed to have become a nursery of idleness, and believed that no
measures of reform could restore the old tone to institutions which the
world had outgrown.[523] In the present age it will perhaps be
considered that Cranmer's sagacity was more right than Latimer's
enthusiasm, however at the moment men's warmer instincts might seem to
have pleaded for the latter. The subsequent history both of the Scotch
and English church permits the belief that neither would have been
benefited by the possession of larger wealth than was left to them. A
purer doctrine has not corrected those careless and questionable habits
in the management of property which were exposed by the visitors of
1535. Whether the cause of the phenomenon lies in an indifference to the
things of the world, or in the more dubious palliation that successive
incumbents have only a life-interest in their incomes, the experience of
three centuries has proved the singular unfitness of spiritual persons
for the administration of secular trusts; and the friends of the
establishment may be grateful that the judgment of the English laity
ultimately guided them to this conclusion. They were influenced, it is
likely, by a principle which they showed rather in their deeds than in
their words. They would not recognise any longer the distinction on
which the claims of the abbeys were rested. Property given to God, it
was urged, might not be again