Society in the Elizabethan Age

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886 Excerpt: ...to this body of greedy, meddling prelates and their vicars, blessed with a few shorn remnants of the garb of their order, with the Word of God in their mouths and the lie to it in their lives. That was not what they had looked for when they put their hands to the great work. They had prospered exceedingly under the new state of things, and chose secretly to attribute this prosperity to their spiritual regeneration. To this idea, as to a mighty fetish, they clung with a resolution that could not be daunted by persecution or weakened by success. What had zealots like these to do with the lovers of pomps and ceremonies, or the manipulators of "hieroglyphic State machines" contrived for the suppression of all liberty of conscience. They went on their way rejoicing amidst the persecution of the most worth-less of men; and they grew and multiplied. Soon a turn of Fortune's wheel brought them uppermost in the State, and they enjoyed fifteen years of power and retribution--fifteen years of liberty, and poverty, and terror. Then Time, which alone is just, worked the vindication of a long dishonoured system. In 1678 it was enough that men had lived to remember the bonfires of the Restoration. CHAPTER IX. THE OFFICIAL. The modern definition of an official in its general acceptation may be taken as "a highly paid diplomatic or lowly paid clerical expert who devotes the best years of his life to the service of (in his eyes) an ungrateful country." This ingratitude, however, where it still exists, may be easily explained by the earlier definition of the personage in question. In this sense the official might be described as " the patentee of the Crown, or the nominee of its advisers;" it being understood that both patronage and emoluments ar...