Hooper's Times
VALUE OF HISTORICAL LIGHT — SEASONABLENESS OF A REFORMER’S
LIFE IN THE PRESENT DAY — CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH RELIGION BEFORE THE REFORMATION — DENSE IGNORANCE — DEGRADING SUPERSTITION — WIDE-SPREAD IMMORALITY — COVE-TOUSNESS AND IMPURITY OF CLERGY — A GREAT DEBT OWING TO THE REFORMATION.
In a day of religious controversy, no one is so useful to his generation as the man who contributes a little “light.” Amidst the din and strife of ecclesiastical warfare, amidst the fog and dust stirred up by excited disputants, amidst assertions and counter-assertions, a thinking man will often cry with the dying philosopher,- — “I want more light: give me more light.” He that can make two ears of corn grow where one grew before, has been rightly called a benefactor to mankind. He that can throw a few rays of fresh light on the theological questions of the day, is surely doing a service to the Church and the world.
Thoughts such as these came across my mind when I chose the subject of this biographical paper: “John Hooper, the martyred Bishop, of Gloucester: his times, life, death, and opinions.” I chose it with a meaning. I have long felt that the lives and opinions of the English Reformers deserve attentive study in the present day. I thought that a picture of John Hooper would throw useful light on points of deep interest in our times.
We live in days when the Romish Church is making gigantic efforts to regain her lost power in England, and thousands of English people are helping her. None are doing the work of Rome so thoroughly as those English Churchmen, who are called Ritualists. Consciously or unconsciously, they are paving the way for her advance, and laying down the rails for her trains. They are familiarizing the mind of thousands with Romish ceremonial, — its millinery, its processions, its gestures, its postures, its theatrical, sensuous, style of worship. They are boldly preaching and publishing downright Romish doctrine, — the real presence, the priestly character of the ministry, the necessity of auricular confession and sacerdotal absolution. They are loudly proclaiming their desire for re-union with the Church of Rome. In short the battle of the Reformation must be fought over again. Ritualism is nothing but Romanism in the bud, and Romanism is Ritualism in flower. The triumph of Ritualism will be the triumph of Romanism and the restoration of Popery. Now before we go back to
Rome, let us thoroughly understand what English Romanism was. -Let us bring in the light. Let us not take a “leap in the dark.”
We live in times when many Churchmen openly sneer at our Reformation, and scoff at our Reformers. The martyrs, whose blood was the seed of our Church, are abused and vilified, and declared to be no martyrs at all. Cranmer is called “a cowardly traitor,” and Latimer “a coarse, illiterate bully.” The Reformation is said to have been “an unmitigated disaster,” and a “change taken in hand by a conspiracy of adulterers, murderers, and thieves.” (See Church Times, of March 14, 1867.) Let us study one of our leading Reformers to-day, and see what the man was like. Let us pass under review one who was a friend and cotemporary of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, and a leading fellow-labourer in the work of the Reformation. Let us find out how he lived, and how he preached, and what he thought, and how he died, before we believe the writers of ritualistic newspapers, and throw him aside. Once more I say, let us bring in the light.
We live in times when the strangest misrepresentations prevail about the true character of the Church of England. Scores of clergymen all over the country are not ashamed to denounce the very name of Protestantism, and to tell people that ‘“Evangelical” Churchmen are not Churchmen at all! Forsooth, we are Calvinists, Puritans, Dissenters, Methodists, Fanatics, and the like, and ought to leave the Church of England and go to our own place! Let us bring these gentlemen to the test of a few plain facts. Let us examine the recorded sentiments, the written opinions of one of the very divines to whom we owe our Articles and Prayer-book, with very few alterations. Let us hear what Bishop Hooper wrote, and thought, and taught. Let us not hastily concede that Ritualists and High Churchmen are the true representatives of the Church of England. “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just, but his neighbour that cometh after searcheth him.” (Pro. xviii. 17.) Once more, I say, let us turn on the light.
I will begin by giving some account of Bishop Hooper’s times — What kind of times were they in a religious point of view? Out of the pages of Fox, Strype, Burnet, Soames, and Blunt, let me try to supply a few historical gleanings.
John Hooper was born in 1495 and died in 1555. He first saw the light in the reign of Henry the Seventh, and was burned in the reign of Queen Mary. He lived through the whole reigns of Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth, and was an eyewitness of all that took place under the government of those two kings. The sixty years of his life take in one of the most eventful periods of English history. It would be impossible to exaggerate the difference there was be-Bishop Hooper — His Times. — . 5
tween England in 1495 and the same England in 1555. In a religious and moral view the whole country was turned upside down. When Hooper was born, the English Reformation had not begun, and the Church of Rome ruled England undisturbed. When he died, the Reformation had struck such deep root, that neither argument nor persecution could overthrow it.
What were the leading characteristics of English religion before the Reformation? In what state did the mighty change which Hooper witnessed and helped forward, find our forefathers? In one word, what does England owe to that subversion of Popery and that introduction of Protestantism, in which Hooper was a leading instrument? Let me try to supply a short answer to these questions. They are subjects, I am sorry to say, on which most people seem to know nothing at all. The minds of the vast majority of my countrymen appear to be a total blank about the history of three hundred years ago. With all the stir made about education, the ignorance of our own country’s history is something lamentable and appalling and depressing. I never can believe that Ritualism would have obtained so many adherents, if English people only knew the extent of our debt to the Protestant Reformation. They would never trifle, and tamper, and dabble with Popery, if they only knew what Popery was.
(a) Before the Reformation one leading feature of
English religion was dense ignorance. There was among all classes a conspicuous absence of all knowledge of true Christianity. A gross darkness overspread the land, a darkness that might be felt. Not one in a hundred could have told you as much about the Gospel of Christ, as we could now learn from any intelligent Sunday-school child.
We need not wonder at this ignorance. The people had neither schools nor Bibles. Wickliffe’s New Testament, the only translation extant till Henry the Eighth’s Bible was printed, cost £2 16s. 3d. of our money. The prayers of the Church were in Latin, and of course the people could not understand them. Preaching there was scarcely any. Quarterly sermons were indeed prescribed to the clergy, but not insisted on. Latimer says that while mass was never to be left unsaid for a single Sunday, sermons might be omitted for twenty Sundays, and nobody was blamed. After all, when there were sermons, they were utterly unprofitable: and latterly to be a preacher was to be suspected of being a heretic.
To cap all, the return that Hooper got from the diocese of Gloucester, when he was first appointed Bishop in 1551, will give a pretty clear idea of the ignorance of Pre-Reformation times. Out of 511 clergy of his diocese, 168 were unable to repeat the ten commandments; 31 of the 168 could not state in what part of Scripture they were to be found; 40 could not tell
Bishop Hooper — His Times. a
where the Lord’s prayer was written; and 31 of the 40 were ignorant who was the author of the Lord’s prayer!
If this is not ignorance, I know not what is. If such were the pastors what must the people have been! If this was the degree of knowledge among the parsons, what must it have been among the people!
(6) But this is not all. Before the Reformation, another leading feature of English religion was superstition of the lowest and most degrading description. Of the extent to which this was carried few, I suspect, have the smallest idea.
Men and women in those days had uneasy consciences sometimes, and wanted relief They had sorrow and sickness and death to pass through, just like ourselves. What could they do? Whither could they turn? There was none to tell them of the love of God and mediation of Christ, of the glad tidings of free, full, and complete salvation, of justification by faith, of grace, and faith, and hope, and repentance. They could only turn to the priests, who knew nothing themselves and could tell nothing to others. “The blind led the blind, and both fell into the ditch.” In a word, the religion of our ancestors, before Hooper’s time, was little better than an organized system of Virgin Mary worship, saint worship, image worship, relic worship, pilgrimages, almsgivings, formalism, ceremonialism,’ processions, prostrations, bowings, crossings, fastings, confessions, absolutions, masses, penances, and blind obedience to the priests. It was a grand higeledy-piggledy of ignorance and idolatry, and serving an unknown God by deputy. The only practical result was that the priests took the people’s money, and undertvok to ensure their salvation, and the people flattered themselves that the more they gave to the priests, the more sure they were of going to heaven.
The catalogue of gross and ridiculous impostures which the priests practised on the people would fill a volume, and I cannot of course do more than supply a few specimens.
At the Abbey of Hales, in Gloucestershire, a vial was shown by the priests to those who offered alms, which was said to contain the blood of Christ. On examination, in King Henry the Kighth’s time, this notable vial was found to contain neither more nor less than the blood of a duck, which was renewed every week.
At Bexley, in Kent, a crucifix was exhibited, which received peculiar honour and large offerings, because of a continual miracle which was said to attend its exhibition. When people offered copper, the face of the figure looked grave; when they offered silver, it relaxed its severity; when they offered gold, it openly smiled. In Henry the Eighth’s time this famous crucifix was examined, and wires were found within it by which the priests could pull the face of the image, and make it assume any expression that they pleased.
Bishop Hooper — His Times. s
At Reading Abbey, in Berkshire, the following relics, among many others, were most religiously worshipped, — an angel with one wing, — the spear-head that pierced our Saviour’s side, — two pieces of the Holy cross, — St. James’ hand, St. Philip’s stole, and a bone of Mary Magdalene.
At Bury St. Edmund’s, in Suffolk, the priests exhibited the coals that roasted St. Lawrence, the parings of St. Edmund’s toe-nails, Thomas a Becket’s penknife and boots, and as many pieces of our Saviour’s cross as would have made, if joined together, one large whole cross
At Maiden Bradley Priory, in Somersetshire, the worshippers were privileged to see the Virgin Mary’s smock, part of the bread used at the original Lord’s supper, and a piece of the stone manager in which our Lord was laid at Bethlehem.
At Bruton Priory, in Somersetshire, was kept a girdle of the Virgin Mary, made of red silk. This solemn relic was sent as a special favour to women in childbirth, to insure them a safe delivery. The like was done with a white girdle of Mary Magdalene, kept at Farley Abbey, in Wiltshire. In neither case, we may be sure, was the relic sent without a pecuniary consideration.*
* Strype and Burnet are my authority for the above mentioned facts.
Records like these are so silly and melancholy that - one hardly knows whether to laugh or to cry. But it is positively necessary to bring them forward, in order that men may know what was the religion of our forefathers before the Reformation. Wonderful as these things may sound in our ears, we must never forget that Englishmen at that time knew no better. A famishing man, in sieges and blockades, has been known to eat mice and rats rather than die of hunger. A soul famishing for lack of God’s Word must not be judged too harshly if it struggles to find comfort in the most grovelling superstition.
(c) One thing more yet remains behind. Before the Reformation, another leading feature of English religion was wide-spread unholiness and immorality. The lives of the clergy, as a general rule, were simply scandalous, and the moral tone of the laity was naturally at the lowest ebb. Of course grapes will never grow on thorns, nor figs on thistles. To expect the huge roots of ignorance and superstition, which filled our land, to bear any but corrupt fruit, would be unreasonable and absurd. But a more thoroughly corrupt set than the English clergy were, in the palmy. days of undisturbed Romanism, it would be impossible to imagine.
I might tell you of the habits of gluttony, drunkenness, and gambling, for which the parochial priesthood became unhappily notorious.
“Too often,”: says Blunt, “they were persons taken from the lowest of the people, with all the gross habits of the class from which they sprang, — loiterers on the ale-house bench, — dicers, scarce able to read by rote their paternoster, often unable to repeat the Ten Commandments, — mass-priests, who could just read their breviaries, and no more, — men often dubbed by the uncomplimentary names of Sir John Lack-Latin, Sir John Mumble-Matins, or babbling and blind Sir John.”
In fact, the carnal living, fat bellies, and general secularity of ministers of religion, were proverbial before the Reformation.
I might tell you of the shameless covetousness which marked the Pre-Reformation priesthood. So long as a man gave liberal offerings at the shrine of such saints as Thomas a Becket, the clergy would absolve him of almost any sin. So long as a felon or malefactor paid the monks well, he might claim sanctuary within the precincts of religious houses, after any crime, and hardly any law could reach him. Yet all this time for Lollards and Wickliffites there was no mercy at all! The very carvings still extant in some old ecclesiastical buildings tell a story in stone and wood, which speaks volumes to this day. Friars were often represented as foxes preaching, with the neck of a stolen goose peeping out of the hood behind, — as wolves giving absolution, with a sheep muffled up in their cloaks, — as apes sitting by a sick man’s bed,
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12 Bishops and Clergy of other days.
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with a crucifix in one hand, and with the other in the sufferer’s pocket. Things must indeed have been at a low ebb, when the faults of ordained ministers were so publicly held up to scorn.
But the blackest spot on the character of our Pre-Reformation clergy in England is one of which it is painful to speak. I mean the impurity of their lives, and their horrible contempt of the seventh commandment. The results of auricular confession, carried on by men bound by their vow never to marry, were such that I dare not enter into them. The consequences of shutting up herds of men and women, in the prime of life, in monasteries and nunneries, were such that I will not defile my readers’ minds by dwelling upon them. Suffice it to say that the discoveries made by Henry the Eighth’s Commissioners, of the goings on in -many of the so-called religious houses, were such as it is impossible to describe. Anything less “holy” than the practice of many of the “holy” men and women of these professedly “holy” retreats from sin and the world, the imagination cannot conceive. If ever there was a plausible theory weighed in the balance and found utterly wanting, it is the favourite theory that celibacy and monasticism promote holiness. Romantic young men and sentimental young ladies may mourn over the ruins of such Abbeys as Battle, and Glastonbury, and Bolton, and Kirkstall, and Furness, and Croyland, and Bury, and Tintern. But I venture
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boldly to say that too many of these houses were sinks of iniquity, and that too often monks and nuns were the scandal of Christianity.
I grant freely that all monasteries and nunneries were not equally bad. I admit that there were religious houses like Godstow Nunnery, near Oxford, which had a stainless reputation. But I fear that these were bright exceptions which only proved the truth of the rule. The preamble of the Act for Dissolution of Religious Houses, founded on the report of Henry the Eighth’s Commissioners, contains broad, general statements, that cannot be got over. It declares “that manifest sin, vicious, carnal, and abominable living is daily used and committed in abbeys, priories, and other religious houses of monks, canons, and nuns, and that albeit many continual visitations have been had, by the space of two hundred years and more, for an honest and charitable reformation of such unthrifty, carnal, and abominable living, yet that nevertheless little or none amendment was hitherto had, but that their vicious living shamefully increased and augmented.”
After all there is no surer receipt for promoting immorality than “fulness of bread and abundance of idleness.” (Ezek. xvi. 49.) Take any number of men and women, of any nation, rank, or class, — bind them by a vow of celibacy, — shut them in houses by themselves, — give them plenty to eat and drink, and give them nothing to do — and above all give them no Bible reading, no true religion, no preaching of the Gospel, no inspection, and no check from public opinion ; — if the result of all this be not abominable and abundant breach of the seventh commandment, I can only say that I have read human nature in vain.
I make no apology for dwelling on these things. Painful and humbling as the picture is, it 1s one that in these times ought to be carefully looked at, and not thrown aside. Before we join in the vulgar outcry which some modern Churchmen are making against the Reformation, I want English people to understand from what the Reformation delivered us. - Before we make up our minds to give up Protestantism and receive back Popery and monasticism, let us thoroughly understand what was the state of England when Popery had its own way. My own belief is that never was a change so loudly demanded as the Reformation, and that never did men do such good service to England, as Hooper and his fellow labourers, the Reformers. In short, unless a man can disprove the plain historical facts recorded in the pages of Strype, Burnet, Soames, and Blunt, he must either admit that the Pre-Reformation times were bad times, or be content to be regarded as a lunatic. To no class of men does England owe such a debt as to our Protestant Reformers, and it is a burning shame if we are ungrateful and refuse to pay. that debt.
Of course it is easy and cheap work to pick holes in the character of some of the agents whom God was pleased to use at the Reformation. No doubt Henry the Eighth, — who had the Bible translated, and made Cranmer and Latimer bishops, and suppressed the monasteries, — was a brutal and bad man. I am not concerned to defend him. But God has often done good work with very bad tools; and the grand result is all we have to look at. And, after all, bad as Henry the Eighth was, the less our Romanizing friends dwell on that point the better. His character at any rate will bear a favourable comparison with that of many of the Popes. At any rate he was a married man.
It is easy, on the other hand, to say that Hooper and his brother Reformers did their work badly, countenanced many abuses, left many things imperfect and incomplete. All this may be very true. But in common fairness men should remember the numerous difficulties they had to contend with, and the mountain of rubbish they had to shovel away. To my mind the wonder is not so much that they did so little, but rather that they succeeded in doing anything at all.
After all, when all has been said, and every objection raised, there remain some great plain facts which cannot well be got over. Let men say what they will, or pick holes where they may, they will never succeed in disproving these facts. To the Reformation Englishmen owe an English Bible, and liberty for every man to read it — To the Reformation they owe the knowledge of the way of peace with God, and of the right of every sinner to go straight to Christ by faith, without bishop, priest, or minister standing in his way. — To the Reformation they owe a Scriptural standard of morality and holiness, such as our ancestors never dreamed of. For ever let us be thankful for these inestimable mercies! Jor ever let us grasp them firmly, and refuse to let them go! For my part, I hold that he who would rob us of these privileges, and draw us back to Pre-Reformation ignorance, superstition and unholiness, is an enemy to his country, and ought to be firmly opposed..