under "the Defender of the
Faith," was in a most flourishing state, the answer of More was an
evidence of political foresight--"Truth, it is, son Roper! and yet I
pray God that we may not live to see the day that we would gladly be at
league and composition with heretics, to let them have their churches
quietly to themselves, so that they would be contented to let us have
ours quietly to ourselves." Whether our great chancellor predicted from
a more intimate knowledge of the king's character, or from some private
circumstances which may not have been recorded for our information, of
which I have an obscure suspicion, remains to be ascertained. The minds
of men of great political sagacity were unquestionably at that moment
full of obscure indications of the approaching change; Erasmus, when at
Canterbury before the tomb of Becket, observing it loaded with a vast
profusion of jewels, wished that those had been distributed among the
poor, and that the shrine had been only adorned with boughs and flowers;
"For," said he, "those who have heaped up all this mass of treasure will
one day be plundered, and fall a prey to those who are in power;"--a
prediction literally fulfilled about twenty years after it was made. The
unknown author of the Visions of Piers Ploughman, who wrote in the reign
of Edward the Third,[181] surprised the world by a famous prediction of
_the fall of the religious houses from the hand of a king_.[182] The
event was realised, two hundred years afterwards, by our Henry the
Eighth. The protestant writers have not scrupled to declare that in this
instance he was _divino numine afflatus_. But moral and political
prediction is not inspiration; the one may be wrought out by man, the
other descends from God. The same principle which led Erasmus to predict
that those who were "in power" would destroy the rich shrines, because
no other class of men in society could mate with so mighty a body as the
monks, conducted the author of Piers Ploughman to the same conclusion;
and since power only could accomplish that great purpose, he fixed on
the highest as the most likely; and thus the wise prediction was, so
long after, literally accomplished!

Sir Walter Rawleigh foresaw the future consequences of the separatists
and the sectaries in the national church, and the very scene his
imagination raised in 1530 has been exhibited, to the letter of his
description, two centuries after the prediction! His memorable words
are-