Page:Life of John Knox (3).pdf/5

5 the power of the Popish church and to these sins, 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 exemparly than their primate, and the contrast between their lives, and those of the reformers, failed not to make a considerable impression on the minds on 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 ever been able, even to the present day, to offer for the monstrous absurdity of their system. The duty of preaching was left to the lowest and most illiterate of the monks.

The following anecdotes give a lively idea of their mode of preaching—The prior of the Black Friars at Newcastle, in a sermon at St Andrews asserted that the Paternoster should be said to God, only and not the saints. This doctrine not meeting the approbation of the learned of that city, they appointed a Gray Friar to refute it, who chose for his text, "Blessed are the poor in spirit,"