TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.
first, second, and third time; and sent down to the Commons. The preamble of it was, 'that it was known what slothful and ungodly life had been led by those who were called religious. But that these houses might be converted to better uses; that God's word might be better set forth; children brought up in learning; clerks nourished in the universities; and that old decayed servants might have livings; poor people might have almshouses to maintain them; readers of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, might have good stipends; daily alms might be administered, and allowance might be made for mending of the highways, and exhibitions for ministers of the Church; for these ends, if the king thought fit to have more bishopricks or cathedral churches erected out of the rents of these houses, full power was given him to erect and found them, and to make rules and statutes for them, and such translations of sees, or divisions of them, as he thought fit.' In the same paper, there is a list of the sees which he intended to found; of which what was done afterwards came so far short, that I know nothing to which it can be so reasonably imputed, as the declining of Cranmer's interest at court, who had proposed the erecting the new cathedrals and sees, with other things mentioned in the preamble of the statute, as a great mean of reforming the Church[1]." Some of the proposed additional dioceses are then enumerated; Essex, Hertford, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, Oxford and Berkshire, Northampton and Huntingdon, Middlesex, Leicester and Rutland, Gloucestershire, Lancashire, Suffolk, Stafford and Salop, Nottingham and Derby, Cornwall. As to the means by which they were to be endowed, no opinion is here expressed on its lawfulness, as the present sketch is confined to the consideration of the spiritual part of the ecclesiastical system. It is scarcely necessary to add, that Cranmer's views were partly realised, in the subsequent creation of the dioceses of Chester, Bristol, Glocester, Oxford, and Peterborough.
The same prelate, whose episcopate has had so important an influence upon the constitution of our Church ever since, also projected with great wisdom, a system of suffragan bishops or
- ↑ Burnet, Hist. Reform. iii.
