These indulgences are granted by Popes
and by Bishops; some on their own mere motion, others at the request of
influential persons. They guarantee remission of punishment for
different spaces of time, varying from forty days to ninety thousand
years; they undertake to secure freedom from hell; they promise pardon
for deadly sins, and for venial sins to the same person for the same
act; they assure to those who comply with their directions a change of
the pain of eternal damnation into the pain of purgatory, and the pain
of purgatory into a free and full pardon.
It may be said that the Church of Rome is not responsible for all these
things. But we need not tarry here to discuss the question how far it
was then competent for a church or nation to have any service-book or
manual of devotion for the faithful, without first obtaining the papal
sanction. For clear it is beyond all question, that such frightful
corruptions as these, of which we are now to give instances, were spread
throughout the land; that such was the religion then imposed on the
people of England; and it was from such dreadful enormities, that our
Reformation, to whatever secondary cause that reformation is to be
attributed--by the providence of Almighty God rescued us. No one laments
more than I do, the extremes into which many opponents of papal Rome
have allowed themselves to run; but no one can feel a more anxious
desire than myself to preserve our Church and people from a return of
such spiritual degradation and wretchedness; and to keep far from us the
most distant approaches of such lamentable and ensnaring superstitions.
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