In the history of religion, human instruments have been permitted to be the great movers of its chief revolutions; and the most important events concerning national religions appear to have depended on the passions of individuals, and the circumstances of the time.  Impure means have often produced the most glorious results; and this, perhaps, may be among the dispensations of Providence.

A similar transaction occurred in Europe and in Asia.  The motives and conduct of Constantine the Great, in the alliance of the Christian faith with his government, are far more obvious than any one of those qualities with which the panegyric of Eusebius so vainly cloaks over the crimes and unchristian life of this polytheistical Christian.  In adopting a new faith as a coup-d’etat, and by investing the church with temporal power, at which Dante so indignantly exclaims, he founded the religion of Jesus, but corrupted its guardians.  The same occurrence took place in France under Clovis.  The fabulous religion of Paganism was fast on its decline; Clovis had resolved to unite the four different principalities which divided Gaul into one empire.  In the midst of an important battle, as fortune hung doubtful between the parties, the pagan monarch invoked the God of his fair Christian queen, and obtained the victory!  St. Remi found no difficulty in persuading Clovis, after the fortunate event, to adopt the Christian creed.  Political reasons for some time suspended the king’s open conversion.  At length the Franks followed their sovereign to the baptismal fonts.  According to Pasquier, Naude, and other political writers, these recorded miracles,[285] like those of Constantine, were but inventions to authorise the change of religion.  Clovis used the new creed as a lever by whose machinery he would be enabled to crush the petty princes his neighbours; and, like Constantine, Clovis, sullied by crimes of as dark a dye, obtained the title of “The Great.”  Had not the most capricious “Defender of the Faith” been influenced by the most violent of passions, the Reformation, so feebly and so imperfectly begun and continued, had possibly never freed England from the papal thraldom;

    For Gospel light first beamed from Bullen’s eyes.

It is, however, a curious fact, that when the fall of Anne Bullen was decided on, Rome eagerly prepared a reunion with the papacy, on terms too flattering for Henry to have resisted.  It was only prevented taking place by an incident that no human foresight could have predicted.  The day succeeding the decapitation of Anne Bullen witnessed the nuptials of Henry with the protestant Jane Seymour.  This changed the whole policy.  The despatch from Rome came a day too late!  From such a near disaster the English Reformation escaped!  The catholic Ward, in his singular Hudibrastic poem of “England’s Reformation,” in some odd rhymes, has characterised it by a naivete, which we are much too delicate