virtue of mankind. Corrupt as the Church of Rome was, there is
reason to believe that, if that Church had been overthrown in the
twelfth or even in the fourteenth century, the vacant space would
have been occupied by some system more corrupt still. There was
then, through the greater part of Europe, very little knowledge;
and that little was confined to the clergy. Not one man in five
hundred could have spelled his way through a psalm. Books were
few and costly. The art of printing was unknown. Copies of the
Bible, inferior in beauty and clearness to those which every
cottager may now command, sold for prices which many priests
could not afford to give. It was obviously impossible that the
laity should search the Scriptures for themselves. It is probable
therefore, that, as soon as they had put off one spiritual yoke,
they would have put on another, and that the power lately
exercised by the clergy of the Church of Rome would have passed
to a far worse class of teachers. The sixteenth century was
comparatively a time of light. Yet even in the sixteenth century
a considerable number of those who quitted the old religion
followed the first confident and plausible guide who offered
himself, and were soon led into errors far more serious than
those which they had renounced. Thus Matthias and Kniperdoling,
apostles of lust, robbery, and murder, were able for a time to
rule great cities. In a darker age such false prophets might have
founded empires; and Christianity might have been distorted into
a cruel and licentious superstition, more noxious, not only than
Popery, but even than Islamism.

About a hundred years after the rising of the Council of
Constance, that great change emphatically called the Reformation
began. The fulness of time was now come. The clergy were no