Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 16.djvu/248

240 to death for denying him to be head of the church, he burned every offender against the doctrines of the Roman faith; and cut off the head of sir Thomas More, a person of the greatest virtue this kingdom ever produced, for not directly owning him to be head of the church. Among all the princes who ever reigned in the world, there was never so infernal a beast as Henry VIII, in every vice of the most odious kind, without any one appearance of virtue: but cruelty, lust, rapine, and atheism, were his peculiar talents. He rejected the power of the pope for no other reason, than to give his full swing to commit sacrilege, in which no tyrant, since Christianity became national, did ever equal him by many degrees. The abbeys, endowed with lands by the mistaken notion of well disposed men, were indeed too numerous, and hurtful to the kingdom; and therefore the legislature might, after the Reformation, have justly applied them to some pious or publick uses.

In a very few centuries after Christianity became national in most parts of Europe, although the church of Rome had already introduced many corruptions in religion; yet the piety of early Christians, as well as the new converts, was so great, and particularly princes, as well as noblemen and other wealthy persons, that they built many religious houses, for those who were inclined to live in a recluse or solitary manner, endowing those monasteries with land. It is true, we read of monks some ages before, who dwelt in caves and cells, in desert places. But, when publick edifices were erected and endowed, they began gradually to degenerate into idleness, ignorance, avarice, ambition, and luxury,