Though generally attached to the church of Rome, the English hierarchy assumed occasionally consider able independence of opinion in matters of church gov ernment; but in one point of faith, in the doctrine of tithes, they were perfectly catholic. To the faithful payment of church dues, they directed their homilies and sermons, as to the first of all Christian duties.
Nothing could exceed the superstitious credulity of the Anglo-Saxon people, or the imprudent hypocrisy of their churchmen. The bigot Dunstan, misnamed the Saint, carried their tyranny over the public mind to its utmost point. We find him, in the history of one of the Anglo-Saxon monarchs, the amiable and unfortu nate Edwy, rushing into the king's private apartment, and tearing him by force from the society of his new married bride. Among the unnatural austerities which this bigot confirmed in the church, was that of celibacy ; for, among the primitive clergy of England, matrimony had been tolerated, and become frequent : but Dunstan basterdized the children of all clerical wedlock, and per secuted the churchmen who would not abandon their wives. The married men, however, did not concede this point without a struggle ; and at a numerous con vocation of the clergy, both the eloquence and reason ableness of the matrimonialists were likely to prevail, when St Dunstan declared, that heaven would interfere to punish the advocates of such wickedness. According to his prediction, the floor gave way beneath the mar ried men, who almost all perished, whilst the saint and his bachelors were left untouched. The public extolled St Dunstan for having wrought this miracle.
The precepts of such a church were equally destruc tive of religion and morality ; reverence to saints trench ed upon the worship of the Creator ; monastic observ ances were preferred to all the active virtues ; and bounty to the church expiated every crime. The monks, (Ingulphus gravely tells us,) whom Edgar and St Dun stan put in possession of convents, were so nearly per fect, that they knew nothing of religion but continence and obedience. Under Ethelred the Unready, a great lover of monks and monasteries, the assembled rulers of the nation, in a full wittenagemot, instead of order ing a levy of the people in arms, when the Danes were destroying the country, only ordered a fast for concili ating the favour of a new saint. The veneration for
relics was carried to extravagance. Eddins, in his life of archbishop Wilfred, informs us, that a queen of North umberland thought it no sin to plunder that prelate of a bagful of holy amulets, and that she always travelled with the stolen treasure in her chariot. Pilgrimages were much to the taste of both sexes, particularly the females. But the beauty and frailty of the fair penitents, we are told, supplied the towns of Italy, France, and Germany, with swarms of prostitutes from these holy tours. Penances, the most ridiculous in themselves, were rendered still more absurd by the latitude that was allowed for performing them by proxy. A fast of seven years might be performed in three days, if the sinner was wealthy enough to persuade 840 persons to keep their stomachs empty for his sake, for that shorter period. To what excesses of blasphemy itself, will not superstition arrive ! Osborne, the biographer of St Dun stan, gravely tells us, that that inestimable father, whose virtues exceeded all human imagination, was permitted to behold, in heaven, the nuptials of his own mother with the eternal God.
10. It is but justice, however, to say of the Anglo Saxon clergy, that, though their church was the nur sery of so much superstition, they were for some ages the only guardians, who preserved a few feeble sparks of literature in an almost benighted period of the human mind ; a period, (says Baronius, speaking of the 9th and 10th centuries,) which, for barbarity, may be com pared m iron, and which for blindness and stupidity, may be called the age of lead. The remark may be ap plied to some other centuries as well as those we have mentioned ; for, when Alfred mounted the throne in the 9th century, he found even the priests unable to read the Latin service. So unlearned indeed for some time was the whole of Europe, that Latin seemed to be for gotten at Rome ; and a German bishop, Meinhard, of Paderborn, used to pray in the following terms : Bene dic Doinine, regibus et reginis, cum mulis et mulabis tuis, instead of famulis, Rc. But before we enter on the few names of the Anglo-Saxon learned, who redeemed this eneral darkness, it may be proper to go back to a still earlier period, and to the only species of literature that can be spoken of before the conversion of the Anglo Saxons to Christianity, viz. their poetry.