Page:Church and State under the Tudors.djvu/40

 of the situation is still further increased by the division of the Church against itself to which I have just referred—the bishops, the monks, and the secular clergy, and from Henry III.'s reign also the friars—all in a greater or lesser degree jealous of one another, and all ready to enter into a temporary alliance with any of the contending parties, whenever by so doing they could obtain an advantage against one or another of their rivals.

The history of the Church, whether as a whole or in England, is one of much complication and difficulty, and is rendered all the more so by the fact that most of those who have written it, have written party pamphlets in the guise of history. The inordinate power which lay in the hands of the clergy during the middle ages, and which had reached its highest point in this country in the very period with which we are now dealing, arose, no doubt, directly or indirectly from three sources, viz.: (1) the supernatural powers with which they were believed to be invested, and which all the recent developments of the Roman faith had tended to increase; (2) the monopoly which they possessed not only of all the learning (in the modern sense of the word) which then existed in the world, but even of those mere rudiments of knowledge, the tools for the acquirement of learning, which we now understand by the term elementary education; and (3) the vows of the monks and the enforced celibacy of the seculars, which at once marked them out as separate from the rest of mankind and welded them together into a caste by themselves. The first of these was an abundant source of wealth; the second was a direct source of power; and the third, while it did not secure them from internal divisions, gave class interests and esprit de corps, and so made their wealth and their power dangerous to