exacted by a distant court, were regarded both as a humiliating
and as a ruinous tribute. The character of that court excited the
scorn and disgust of a grave, earnest, sincere, and devout
people. The new theology spread with a rapidity never known
before. All ranks, all varieties of character, joined the ranks
of the innovators. Sovereigns impatient to appropriate to
themselves the prerogatives of the Pope, nobles desirous to share
the plunder of abbeys, suitors exasperated by the extortions of
the Roman Camera, patriots impatient of a foreign rule, good men
scandalised by the corruptions of the Church, bad men desirous of
the licence inseparable from great moral revolutions, wise men
eager in the pursuit of truth, weak men allured by the glitter of
novelty, all were found on one side. Alone among the northern
nations the Irish adhered to the ancient faith: and the cause of
this seems to have been that the national feeling which, in
happier countries, was directed against Rome, was in Ireland
directed against England. Within fifty years from the day on
which Luther publicly renounced communion with the Papacy, and
burned the bull of Leo before the gates of Wittenberg,
Protestantism attained its highest ascendency, an ascendency
which it soon lost, and which it has never regained. Hundreds,
who could well remember Brother Martin a devout Catholic, lived
to see the revolution of which he was the chief author,
victorious in half the states of Europe. In England, Scotland,
Denmark, Sweden, Livonia, Prussia, Saxony, Hesse, Wurtemburg, the
Palatinate, in several cantons of Switzerland, in the Northern
Netherlands, the Reformation had completely triumphed; and in all
the other countries on this side of the Alps and the Pyrenees, it
seemed on the point of triumphing.