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England under the Tudors by Arthur D. (Arthur Donald) Innes
page 132 of 600 (22%)
charitable. But his own convictions were thoroughly orthodox; he had at one
time a strong disposition to enter the priesthood himself; he held the
priestly office in high reverence. Yet his restriction of the number of
priests in _Utopia_ shows his vivid consciousness of the evil wrought
by their unrestricted multiplication in England; and in the description of
English social conditions in the introductory portion of his work, he
refers in emphatic terms to the large proportion of "sturdy vagabonds"
among them. His whole tone in the section of his book devoted to religious
matters implies that he is pointing a contrast between his ideal order of
things and that familiar to his readers, wherein non-essentials are so
emphasised that essentials are practically forgotten. Yet More, like Colet,
makes no sweeping attack on the morality (in the narrower popular sense of
the term) prevalent among the clerical body.

[Sidenote: Exaggerated attacks]

The wholesale condemnation of later days has been largely due to the
acceptance without qualification of denunciations poured forth in the heat
of controversy, in days when men did not mince words and were not given to
the careful weighing of evidence. Typical of such works is the
_Supplicacyon for the Beggers_ produced by one Simon Fish in 1527,
which has been seriously treated as a sober indictment. The Clergy, from
Bishops to "Somners" are a "rauinous cruell and insatiabill generacion"
... "counterfeit holy and ydell beggers and vacabundes" ... "that corrupt
the hole generation of mankind," committing "rapes murdres and treasons".
They are a "gredy sort of sturdy idell holy theues" habitually guilty of
every conceivable form of vice and profligacy. The pamphlet teams with
arithmetical absurdities. It is simply inconceivable that the growth within
the realm of such an organisation as is here depicted would have been
permitted; or that, if there, it would not have been sternly repressed by
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