Page:Life and meritorious transactions of John Knox (2).pdf/5

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would have chosen to leave the world without destining some of his substance to pious purposes.) Their courts had likewise the cognisance of all testamentary deeds and matrimonial contracts, and to these engines of power, and often in their hands of oppression, they super-added the sentence of ex-communication, which besides depriving the unhappy victim on whom it fell of all Christian privileges, cut him off from every right as a man or citizen. To these, and other causes of a similar nature, may be ascribed the power of the Popish church; and to these, also, combined with the celibacy to which by the rule of their church they were restricted, may be attributed the dissolute and licentious lives of the clergy, which in the end destroyed that reputation for sanctity, the people had been accustomed to attach to their character. According to the accounts of the reformers, confirmed by several popish writers, the manners of the Scottish clergy were indecent in the extreme. Cardinal Beaton celebrated the marriage of his eldest daughter with the son of the Earl of Crawford, with an almost regal magnificence, and maintained a criminal correspondence with her mother to the end of his days. The other prelates were not more exemplary than their primate, and the contrast between their lives, and those of the reformers, failed not to make a considerable impression on the minds of the people. Instead of disguising their vices the Popish clergy affected to despise censure; instead of endeavouring to colour over the absurdity of the established doctrines, or found them on Scripture, they left them to the authority of the church and decrees of the councils; the only apology they have