nified. By statute 29 Geo. II. c. 17. it is moreover enacted, that to serve under the French king, as a military officer, shall be felony without benefit of clergy; and to enter into the Scotch brigade, in the Dutch service, without previously taking the oaths of allegiance and abjuration, shall be a forfeiture of 500%. 4. FELONY, by imbezzling the king's armour or warlike stores, is so declared to be by statute 31 Eliz. c. 4. which enacts, that if any perfon having the charge or custody of the king's armour, ordnance, ammunition, or habiliments of war; or of any victual provided for victualling the king's soldiers or mariners; shall, either for gain, or to impede his majesty's service, imbezzle the same to the value of twenty shillings, such offence shall be felony. And the statute 22 Car. II. c. 5. takes away the benefit of clergy from this offence, fo far as it relates to naval stores. Other inferior imbezzlements and mifdemesnors, that fall under this denomination, are punished by statute 1 Geo. I. c. 25. with fine and imprisonment. 5. DESERTION from the king's armies in time of war, whether by land or fea, in England or in parts beyond the seas, is by the standing laws of the land (exclufive of the annual acts of parliament to punish mutiny and desertion) and particularly by statute 18 Hen.VI. c. 19. and 5 Eliz. c. 5. made felony, but not without benefit of clergy. But by the statute 2 & 3 Edw.VI. c. 2. clergy is taken away from such deferters, and the offence is made triable by the justices of every shire. The fame statutes punish other inferior military offences with fines, imprisonment, and other penalties. A THIRD species of offence more immediately affecting the king and his government, though not fubject to capital punishment, is that of praemunire : so called from the words of the writ preparatory to the prosecution thereof; "praemunire "facias A. B." forewarn A. B. that he appear before us to anfwer the contempt wherewith he stands charged; which contempt is particularly recited in the preamble to the writ. It took it's original from the exorbitant power claimed and exercised in England by the pope, which even in the days of blind zeal was too heavy for our ancestors to bear. It may justly be observed, that religious principles, which (when genuine and pure) have an evident tendency to make their professors better citizens as well as better men, have (when perverted and erroneous) been usually fubversive of civil government, and been made both the cloak and the instrument of every pernicious design that can be harboured in the heart of man. The unbounded authority that was exercised by the Druids in the west, under the influence of pagan superftition, and the terrible ravages committed by the Saracens in the east, to propagate the religion of Mahomet, both witness to the truth of • A barbarous word for praemonere. Old Nat. Brev. 101. edit. 1534 that • Address to James II. 1687. that antient universal observation; that, in all ages and in all countries, civil and ecclesiastical tyranny are mutually productive of each other. And it is the glory of the church of England, as well as a strong presumptive argument in favour of the purity of her faith, that she hath been (as her prelates on a trying occasion once expressed it') in her principles and practice ever most unquestionably loyal. The clergy of her perfuafion, holy in their doctrines and unblemished in their lives and conversation, are also moderate in their ambition, and entertain just notions of the ties of society and the rights of civil government. As in matters of faith and morality they acknowlege no guide but the scriptures, so, in matters of external polity and of private right, they derive all their title from the civil magistrate; they look up to the king as their head, to the parliament as their lawgiver, and pride themselves in nothing so justly, as in being true members of the church, emphatically by law established. Whereas the principles of those who differ from them, as well in one extreme as the other, are equally and totally destructive of those ties and obligations by which all society is kept together; equally encroaching on those rights, which reason and the original contract of every free state in the universe have vested in the sovereign power; and equally aiming at a distinct independent supremacy of their own, where spiritual men and spiritual causes are concerned. The dreadful effects of such a religious bigotry, when actuated by erroneous principles, even of the protestant kind, are sufficiently evident from the history of the anabaptists in Germany, the covenanters in Scotland, and that deluge of sectaries in England, who murdered their sovereign, overturned the church and monarchy, shook every pillar of law, justice, and private property, and most devoutly established a kingdom of the faints in their stead. But these horrid devastations, the effects of mere madness or of zeal that was nearly allied to it, though violent and tumultuous, were but of a short duration. Whereas the progress of the papal policy, long actuated by the steady counsels of successive pontiffs, took deeper root, and was at length in some places with difficulty, in others never yet, extirpated. For this we might call to witness the black intrigues of the Jesuits, so lately triumphant over Christendom, but now universally abandoned by even the Roman catholic powers: but the subject of our present chapter rather leads us to confider the vast strides, which were formerly made in this kingdom by the popish clergy; how nearly they arrived to effecting their grand design; some few of the means they made use of for establishing their plan; and how almost all of them have been defeated or converted to better purposes, by the vigour of our free constitution, and the wisdom of fuccessive parliaments. took THE antient British church, by whomsoever planted, was a stranger to the bishop of Rome, and all his pretended authority. But, the pagan Saxon invaders having driven the professors of chriftianity to the remoteft corners of our island, their own conversion was afterwards effected by Augustin the monk, and other miffionaries from the court of Rome. This naturally introduced some few of the papal corruptions in point of faith and doctrine; but we read of no civil authority claimed by the pope in these kingdoms, till the aera of the Norman conquest: when the then reigning pontiff having favoured duke William in his projected invasion, by blessing his host and confecrating his banners, he took that opportunity also of establishing his spiritual encroachments; and was even permitted so to do by the policy of the conqueror, in order more effectually to humble the Saxon clergy and aggrandize his Norman frelates: prelates, who, being bred abroad in the doctrine and practice of slavery, had contracted a reverence and regard for it, and took a pleasure in rivetting the chains of a free-born people. THE most stable foundation of legal and rational government is a due fubordination of rank, and a gradual scale of authority; and tyranny also itself is most surely supported by a regular increase of despotism, rifing from the flave to the fultan: with this difference however, that the measure of obedience in the one is grounded on the principles of society, and is extended no farther than reason and necessity will warrant; in the other it is limited only by absolute will and pleasure, without permitting the inferior to examine the title upon which it is founded. More effectually therefore to enflave the confciences and minds of the people, the Romish clergy themselves paid the most implicit obedience to their own superiors or prelates; and they, in their turns, were as blindly devoted to the will of the fovereign pontiff, whose decifions they held to be infallible, and his authority co-extensive with the christian world. Hence his legates a latere were introduced into every kingdom of Europe, his bulles and decretal epistles became the rule both of faith and difcipline, his judgment was the final refort in all cafes of doubt or difficulty, his decrees were enforced by anathemas and spiritual cenfures, he dethroned even kings that were refractory, and denied to whole kingdoms (when undutiful) the exercise of christian ordinances, and the benefits of the gospel of God. But, though the being spiritual head of the church was a thing of great found, and of greater authority, among men of confcience and piety, yet the court of Rome was fully apprized that (among the bulk of mankind) power cannot be maintained without property; and therefore it's attention began very early to be rivetted upon every method that promised pecuniary advantage. The doctrine of purgatory was introduced, and with it the purchase of masses to redeem the souls of the deceased. New-fangled offences were created, and indulgences were fold to the wealthy, for liberty to fin without danger. The canon law took cognizance of crimes, injoined penance pro falute animae, and commuted that penance for money. Non-refidence and pluralities among the clergy, and marriages among the laity related within the seventh degree, were strictly prohibited by canon; but difpenfations were seldom denied to those who could afford to buy them. In short, all the wealth of chriftendom VOL. IV. 0 was |