an faith; and cut off the head of Sir Thomas
More, a person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced, for
not directly owning him to be head of the Church. Among all the princes
who ever reigned in the world there was never so infernal a beast as
Henry VIII. in every vice of the most odious kind, without any one
appearance of virtue: But cruelty, lust, rapine, and atheism, were his
peculiar talents. He rejected the power of the Pope for no other reason,
than to give his full swing to commit sacrilege, in which no tyrant,
since Christianity became national, did ever equal him by many degrees.
The abbeys, endowed with lands by the mistaken notions of well-disposed
men, were indeed too numerous, and hurtful to the kingdom; and,
therefore, the legislature might, after the Reformation, have justly
applied them to some pious or public uses.

In a very few centuries after Christianity became national in most parts
of Europe, although the church of Rome had already introduced many
corruptions in religion; yet the piety of early Christians, as well as
new converts, was so great, and particularly of princes, as well as
noblemen and other wealthy persons, that they built many religious
houses, for those who were inclined to live in a recluse or solitary
manner, endowing those monasteries with land. It is true, we read of
monks some ages before, who dwelt in caves and cells, in desert places.
But, when public edifices were erected and endowed, they began gradually
to degenerate into idleness, ignorance, avarice, ambition, and luxury,
after the usual fate of all human institutions. The Popes, who had
already aggrandized themselves, laid hold of the opportunity to subject
all religious houses with their priors and abbots, to their peculiar
authority; whereby these religious orders became of an interest directly
different from the rest of mankind, and wholly at the Pope's devotion. I
need say no more on this article, so generally known and so frequently
treated, or of the frequent endeavours of some other princes, as well as
our own, to check the growth, and wealth, and power of the regulars.

In later times, this mistaken piety, of erecting and endowing abbeys,
began to decrease. And therefore, when some new-invented sect of monks
and friars began to start up, not being able to procure grants of land,
they got leave from the Pope to appropriate the tithes and glebes of
certain parishes, as contiguous or near as they could fi