Viewing page 215 of 285

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

120 Annual Register

[[two columns per page]]
[[left column]]
and theology. In the mean time, the Greek language flourished at Cambridge, under the instruction of Cheke and Smyth; notwithstanding the absurd oppositions of their chancellor, Bishop Gardiner, about pronunciation. But Cheke being soon called up to court, both universities seem to have been reduced to the same deplorable condition of indigence and illiteracy. 
During the reign of Edward the Sixth, whose minority, which promised many virtues, was abused by corrupt counsellors and rapacious courtiers, little attention was paid to the support of literature. Learning was not the fashion of the times: and being discouraged or despised by the rich who were perpetually grasping at its rewards, was neglected by those of moderate fortunes. Avarice and zeal were at once gratified in robbing the clergy of their revenues, and in reducing the church to its primitive apostolical state of purity and poverty. A favourite nobleman of the court held the deanery and treasurership of a cathedral, with some of its best canonries; while his son enjoyed an annual income of three hundred pounds from the lands of a bishoprick. In every robbery of the church, the interests of learning suffered. Exhibitions and pensions were subtracted from the students in the universities. At Oxford the public schools were neglected by the professors and scholars, and allotted to the lowest purposes. All academical degrees were abrogated as antichristian. The spiritual reformers of those enlightened days proceeded so far, as to strip the public library, established and enriched by that noble patron Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, of all

[[right column]]

its books and manuscripts; to pillage the archives, and disannul the privileges of the university. From these measures many of the colleges were in a short time entirely deserted. His successor, Queen Mary, took pains to restore the splendor of the university of Oxford. Unamiable as she was in her temper and duct, and inflexibly bigotted to the glaring absurdities of catholic superstition, she protected, at least by liberal donations, the interests of learning. She not only contributed large sums for rebuilding the public schools, but moreover granted the university three considerable impropriations. In her charter reciting these benefactions, she declares it to be her determined resolution, to employ her royal munificence in reviving its antient lustre and and discipline, and recovering its privileges. These privileges she re-established with the addition of fresh immunities: and for these good offices the university decreed for her, and her husband Philip, an anniversary commemoration. I need not recall to the readers' memory, that Sir Thomas Pope, and Sir Thomas Whyte, were still more important benefactors by their respective foundations. Without all these favours, although they did not perhaps produce an immediate improvement, the university would still have continued to decay: and they were at least a balance, at that time, on the side of learning, against the pernicious effects of returning popery.  
In the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, which soon followed, when protestantism might have been expected to produce a speedy change for the better, puritanism began to prevail, 
[[end of page]]
For the Y E A R 1772. 121

prevail, and for some time continued to retard the progress of ingenuous and useful knowledge. Then English reformed clergy, who during the persecutions of Queen Mary had fled into Germany, now returned in great numbers; and in consideration of their sufferings and learning, many of them were preferred to eminent stations in the church. They brought back with them those narrow principles about church-government and ceremonies, which they had imbibed, and which did well enough, in the petty states and republics aboard, where they lived like a society of philosophers; but which were inconsistent with the genius of a more extended church, established in a great and magnificent nation, and requiring a settled system of policy, and the observance of external institutions. However, they were judged proper instruments to be employed at the head of ecclesiastical affairs, by way of making the reformation at once effectual. But unluckily this measure, specious as it appeared at first, tended to draw the church into the contrary extreme. In the mean time their reluctance or absolute refusal to conform, in many instances, to the established ceremonies, and their speculative theology, tore the church into violent divisions, and occasioned endless absurd disputes, unfavourable to the progress of real learning, and productive of an illiterate clergy, at least unskilled in liberal and manly science. In fact, even the common ecclesiastical preferments had been so much diminished by the seizure and alienation of impropriations, in the late predations of the church, which were not yet ended, that few persons were regularly bred to the church, or, in other words, received a learned education. Hence almost any that offered themselves were without distinction admitted to the sacred function. Insomuch, that in 1560, an injunction was directed to the Bishop of London from his metropolitan, ordering him to forbear ordaining any more artificers, and other unlearned persons who had exercised secular occupations. But as the evil was unavoidable, this caution took but little effect. About the year 1563, there were only two divines, the dean of Christ Church, and the president of Magdalene college, who were capable of preaching the public sermons at Oxford. Many proofs have been mentioned of the extreme ignorance of our clergy at this time: to which I shall add one, which is curious and new. In 1570, Horne Bishop of Winchester, enjoined the miner canons of this cathedral to get by memory, every week, one chapter of St. Paul's epistles in Latin: and this task, beneath the abilities of an ordinary school-boy, was actually repeated by some of them, before the bishop, dean, and prebendaries, at a public episcopal visitation of that church. The taste for Latin composition, and it was fashionable both to write and speak in that language, was much worse than in the reign of Henry the Eighth, when juster models were studied. One is surprized to fined the learned Archbishop Grindal, in the statutes of a school which he founded and amply endowed, prescribing such strange classics as Palingenius, Sedulius, and Prudentius, to be taught in the new seminary. Much has been said about
the

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-05-12 15:10:16