protest against, and sometimes to deprecate. I entreat you, Sir, do not impute this to want of temper, or to any personal disrespect...but to a habit of expressing in the readiest words what is distinctly perceived and strongly felt,.. to a deep sense of the importance of the subject,..and to the necessity which this great argument must always impose upon one who in full sincerity undertakes it. With your statements I must deal as they deserve, and with your reasoning also; but even when I come to those assertions which, were it possible for you to prove them, would affect me as a man of intregrity even more than in my literary character, I will not forget the terms on which we have heretofore met, the pleasure which I have experienced in your society and at your table, and the courtesies which have passed between us... It is only when actually engaged in this vindication that I can regard you as an adversary in the intervals, when that occupation is suspended, I am not sensible of any adversarious feeling; nothing remains but pleasant recollections. Were my temper irritable, (which all who know me will bear witness it is not,) I would on this occasion endeavour to control it. Even when insulted by such assailants as Dr. Milner, I might say of them with Scaliger," Ego ejusmodi ingenia magis odi quam curo," if I cared for them enough to hate them,...if scorn did not supply the place of indignation. But in you, Sir, I have at least a courteous antagonist: when any thing unfair or unworthy appears in your argument, I attribute it to the weakness of a cause for which nothing better can be advanced; and when any thing occurs to which a harsher epithet might be applied, I impute it to the persons upon whose authority and good faith you have not more implicitly than imprudently relied. Bear you, Sir, with the plainness of an honest straightforward style, which expresses all that it means, as I on my part am willing to forgive injurious misrepresentations, and insinuations. which mean more than they express! There will then be no breach of charity between us : and when we retire from the contest it will be with feelings of mutual good will. 277 LETTER VII. CHARGES AGAINST THE MONKS OF WITHHOLDING TO IMMODERATE SEVERITY." WHEN I was composing Madoc, Sir, St. Dunstan served as a model for the Priest of Mexitli; and, as a proof that I had caught the general likeness, the resemblance was perceived and noticed in a reviewal of that poem. The view which I have taken of his character is that in which every Protestant writer has beheld it, from the days of Archbishop Parker. But you tell us that till the Reformation this Saint was always considered as an ornament to his religion and his country; and you express your wonder that such a change of opinion should then have taken place without the discovery of a single new fact that could justify it... Suppose, Sir, the Turks were to be converted, and become a Christian people; would it surprize you if they were then to consider * Pages 57-68. Mahommed as an impostor? The history of his life would remain the same, but the Turks would There were always have learnt to examine it. men who knew what Dunstan had been, because they were men of the same stamp, and acted upon the same principles; but these were his successors in the craft, and of course would not betray its secrets; and if there were others who saw the truth, they dared not utter it till the Reformation brought with it liberty as well as light. It was not therefore in any hurry of composition that I spake* of Dunstan's successors as disposed to uphold the ascendancy which they had founded upon deceit, by uncommunicated knowledge and unrelenting severity. You are pleased (and in this instance with an urbanity of manner whereof controversial writings afford few examples) to express your surprize that such expressions should have fallen from my pen; "for, were not monasteries," you ask, t "the only schools? and was not knowledge most liberally communicated in them?" Those schools indeed have been of infinite service to mankind; ... of such service that their beneficial consequences have far outbalanced all the evil, Book of the Church, i. 14. + Page 73. great as that has been and is, of the institutions with which they were connected... But the secrets of monkery and priestcraft were not taught in them,... the knowledge in mechanics, in optics, in acoustics, by which wonders were performed,... nor the daring impiety which scrupled not at employing such means to such an end, and which implies in too many leading spirits of their age a total disbelief of the religion which they professed. I am not here supposing a confederacy like that of the Illuminés; nor that the Romish Clergy had their mysteries wherein it was disclosed to the initiated that all which the vulgar were taught to believe, was for the vulgar only. Some of your Popes and Cardinals, however, have been greatly belied by each other, if they did not hold the whole of Christianity for a fable...and as much belied by historians of their own communion and their own times, if they did not act as if they thought so. These indeed were monsters of wickedness. is not to such men among the Romish Clergy that infidelity is confined; it is not to the dissolute and the daring, those in whom the heart corrupts the understanding, or they who are betrayed by the pride of intellect into errors as gross as the grossest devices of superstition. But it |