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who was by no means singular in the intenseness of his worship, for he was the contemporary of Coke, among the rest, of whom even James the First had declared, "that he was the fittest instrument for a tyrant that had ever been known in England." Not only in speech, but much more in action, Euphuism was at court the established order of the day. But the people were not so easily reconciled to the change. The sudden cessation of the ancient check to arbitrary power, had plunged England into a deeper gulph of despotism than she had ever known before. It was for the people to create another in its place, out of the means which were still in their own hands. The imbecility of James favoured the commencement of the enterprise, and under the reign of his son, the English liberties were at last consolidated, but the reaction was fearful,—and the price paid for the boon was the extinction of the monarchy-and the Iron Mask at Whitehall!

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If St. Thomas of Canterbury had defended the rights of the English Church against the populace, and not against the crown, he would have won and retained the sympathies and love of even the Anglican clergy of modern times. As it was, however, one of the first acts of the Reformation was to cite the saint, in impious mockery of forms of justice, to appear in thirty days before the council, and there to answer to a charge of high treason. On the 2d of June 1538,* by a decree of the king in council, St. Thomas was declared guilty of the crime of leze-majesté, treason, perjury, and rebellion." The hatred which his firmness against the regal prerogative excited in the breast of every man who preached the freedom of conscience, as understood by the makers of the Reformation, affords several other instances equally characteristic. We have at this moment open before us the famous Parisian edition of the Hora Beatissimæ Virginis Mariæ, published in the year 1526, with the rubric in English. On the fly-leaf of our copy, is the autograph of White Kennett, the famous Protestant bishop of Peterborough, who seems to have cherished in secret a formula of prayer which the homilies pronounced idolatrous, and the possession of which had been made illegal by act of parliament. But the castigating hand of the bishop had been busy on the book, and the passages which he has obliterated belong to one of three classes,-1st, all sentences in which indulgences are named; 2d, all words expressing the title of Pope; or 3dly, all passages which relate to

Both the citation and the decree are to be met with in Wilkins' Concilia, vol. iii.

p. 836.

the martyrdom of St. Thomas of Canterbury. In the last class, the episcopal virulence is perhaps more alive than in either of the former. It would be worth the while to ascertain whether that orthodox prelate considered, that in performing this duty of correction, he had succeeded in removing every taint of heterodoxy from the book.

But whatever the opinion of Protestant prelates upon this subject is, or may have been, it is cheering to know, that even in these days, the bright examples of the Church of our fathers are not lost upon the lover of British freedom, any more than upon the practices of Christian duties. If we cling to the ancient faith of England with. undying adherence, upon the one hand, we preserve the love of justice and hatred of oppression, which were warm within our fathers' hearts, upon the other.

"And if," as Mr. Ozanam eloquently expresses it, "in this famous isle, whole generations have kept themselves immovable in the faith of their ancestors: if, after three hundred years of persecutions and reproaches, Catholicism has raised her brow, and now extends herself with a marvellous force, that makes Reformation to tremble even in her golden palaces; if Ireland has broken her bands by one sublime effort,-if a wondrous man has arisen from the midst of his Catholic brethren, and has, in their name, protested against the satraps of heresy; it is, perhaps, because, among those faithful generations, in that Ireland, and upon that man, hovers the great soul of St. Thomas of Canterbury. God forbid that I compare a mortal man, and one that is not yet judged, with him whose memory has received a solemn consecration! But him also, the unconquerable Archbishop, his enemies called the Great Agitator!"

And to these heroes of the middle age, those who walk not with us, have reason to be grateful too. For if our England had succumbed to Henry II, in the person of her Church, four centuries before the light of knowledge appeared in the brightness of noon-day,-if the temporal power, so material and barbarous, had at that time absorbed the spiritual power, as has long been the case in the Russian empire,-the whole kingdom, shut out from all intercourse with the faithful nations around them, "save on the field of battle," must assuredly "have descended to a degree of brutishness comparable to the state of Russia, from the day when she became schismatic down to the

There is in the library of St. Edmund's College, in Hertfordshire, a Missal, in which the Mass for St. Thomas of Canterbury has been erased. The word Pope has also been made to disappear throughout the whole volume. This missal was, it would seem, intended to be, like the "Philologia Sacra" of Glassius, “nostris temporibus accommodata.”

days of Peter the Great." If, too, the destruction of feudalism, and the formation of modern society upon its ruins, be justly regarded as two great benefits to the European race, then all Europe must applaud the generous devotion of the Church, which inspired her to stand forth, resist, and overcome, as often as the feebleness of the sovereign, the lowliness of the commons, and the sense of its own iron strength, tempted feudality forth from its just bounds, and invited it to undertake its frequent invasions upon the entirety of society. An union with the Church, its only potent adversary, must have crushed all opposition, doubled the intensity of its power, and prolonged for many ages the era of its reign. Perhaps it is not too much to suppose, that even in our days we might still have had to look forward to the closing scene of its existence.

We now take our leave of the book before us, with our thanks to its author for his services to our national cause, and the sanguine assurance, that it will soon become the welcome guest of many an English circle.

ART. III. 1. Geschichte der Vorläufer der Reformation. History of the Forerunners of the Reformation. By Dr. Ludwig Flathe. Leipsig. 1835.

2. Histoire des Vaudois des Vallées du Piémont.

A. Muston. Paris. 1834.

3. Considérations sur les Vaudois. Par M. Peyran.

Par

4. Recherches Historiques sur la véritable Origine des Vaudois, et sur le Caractère de leurs Doctrines Primitives. Paris. 1836.

MONG the credentials of a new sect, it is important that a good pedigree should find its place. With a true religion there is no difficulty in satisfying this necessity, or, rather, the religion is a genealogy unto itself. But if, unhappily, the falsehood of the doctrine should render it desirable to resort to somè "ingenious device" of the coiner's art, and to gild the naked dross in the glitter of a fiction, there is, at the outset, to be overcome the jealous vigilance of all contemporary observers, and then for an eternal future, to be feared the hazard of detection and exposure. Now these are all very serious things, and not so easily to be guarded against, as easily to be foreseen. The consequence, however, is one very fatal to the sanguinelyconceived and cunningly-devised forthcomings of the ambitious brains of our religionist,-they want the sanction of age,

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they tell too plainly of notions and motions, human, every-day, common-place,-not a man who reviews them but can put his finger upon every article of them, and say, "This came or might have come in my own generation."

Our Anglican fellow-countrymen seem, at last, to fear that they are thus awkwardly situated. We have drawn attention. more than once, and especially in our last number, to the evidence which has of late years been repeatedly afforded us by the High Church section of their body, of an irresistible conviction upon their parts, that notwithstanding the great rejoicings which welcomed the dawning of the morn of the English Tercentenary,—a period, after all, of only three centuries, is not in fact such an existence as gives to that or any Church professing to be Christian, a very great subject of exultation, and that in the nineteenth century of the Christian era, that Church must, at the best, be deemed but ill-provided with a title to her followers' allegiance, which contents herself with tracing out a descent more or less unbroken from some sectary of the sixteenth century. We took occasion, however, to demonstrate how utterly groundless and inconsequential were the pretensions put forth by these discontented upholders of free inquiry to any more illustrious descent, or to any portion of the traditions of the primitive Church, or of their divine jurisdiction and apostolical succession. The attempt, however, to make these pretensions good, had been already of frequent occurrence, but of an uniform ill-success. It has been one of the means employed at various periods in the history of Anglicanism, by such of her sons as believed it important to establish a communion with the Church of the apostolic age.

It was only one of those means; and it is our intention in the present paper to indicate another method which is sometimes employed for the same end, but of a character altogether different. We allude to the endeavours of certain writers to affiliate the Protestants to the Waldenses, and these again to SS. Paul and James, thus tracing the stream of the Reformation to within the sacred enclosure of the apostolic college itself. An easy, clear, and natural conclusion,-only supposing the premises to have been sufficiently founded upon fact! This important condition, however, has as yet been complied with, neither on the part of the Waldenses themselves, nor on that of their would-be descendants,-and we trust that we shall make good this assertion in the present article, so as to satisfy the judgment of every sensible and candid reader.

Who were the Vaudois or Waldenses? What was their era? What were their doctrines ? And in what relation do they

stand to the Vaudois of the present day? These are the questions which naturally present themselves to the mind, on the answers to which rests the whole controversy before us. And they must be resolved by an appeal to facts and documents, without whose testimony on the points all history becomes romance, all conclusions, speculation. It may here be proper at once to observe, that the Vaudois writers, as well modern as ancient (we speak of course relatively), although much divided against each other, and even contradicting themselves, as we shall hereafter show, with respect to the real antiquity of their Alpine sect, are nevertheless agreed in giving the most unqualified contradiction to the testimony which Catholic and other writers of credibility have at all times rendered to their descent from an obscure fanatic of the latter end of the twelfth century, Peter Valdo, the merchant of Lyons. They renounce him for their founder,-for, being Alpines, how can they brook aught but an Alpine extraction? and claiming him for their descendant, they disclaim him for the author of their name, affecting, in their passion for antiquity, to discover in their own valleys, under their Latin or French designations, an etymology everlasting as the hills which tower around them. The question, therefore, having assumed the character of so tangible an issue, we proceed, at once, to the investigation, not being desirous on the one hand that Valdo should be thus ungratefully deprived of his rights of paternity, nor on the other hand, that the preceding annals of the Church should be intruded on by a heresy, which, in fact, never belonged to them. We are greatly indebted to the intelligent and learned author of the Recherches Historiques, a Piedmontese bishop, for the long and numerous citations upon this and many other heads which he has given us in his valuable work, the fruit of severe and laborious research, and of which we intend to avail ourselves largely upon the present occasion.

We shall begin with the Catholic view of the subject; and this, not only because we of all others have the right to do so, but because that view is, as usual, the oldest in the field, and here, as everywhere else, we find our adversaries reduced to deny our statements and protest against our proofs. But the evidence which they would repudiate is that of all the contemporary writers of their founder, Valdo, who are of one consent in establishing his fame as a new heresiarch, following practices, and preaching doctrines wholly distinct indeed from those of the Church, but equally independent in their origin of all the heretical or schismatic sects that had appeared since the days of the apostles down to their own times. To understand more

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