But no change of so vast a kind can be other than a stone of stumbling to those many persons for whom the beaten ways of life alone are tolerable, and who, when these ways are broken, are bewildered and lost.  Religion, when men are under its influence at all, so absorbs their senses, and so pervades all their associations, that no faults in the ministers of it can divest their persons of reverence; and just and necessary as all these alterations were, many a pious and noble heart was wounded, many a man was asking himself in his perplexity where things would end, and still more sadly, where, if these quarrels deepened, would lie his own duty.  Now the Nun of Kent grew louder in her Cassandra wailings.  Now the mendicant friars mounted the pulpits exclaiming sacrilege; bold men, who feared nothing that men could do to them, and who dared in the king’s own presence, and in his own chapel, to denounce him by name.[360] The sacred associations of twelve centuries were tumbling into ruin; and hot and angry as men had been before the work began, the hearts of numbers sank in them when they “saw what was done;” and they fell away slowly to doubt, disaffection, distrust, and at last treason.

The first outward symptom of importance pointing in this direction, was the resignation of the seals by Sir Thomas More.[361] More had not been an illiberal man; when he wrote the Utopia, he seemed even to be in advance of his time.  None could see the rogue’s face under the cowl clearer than he, or the proud bad heart under the scarlet hat; and few men had ventured to speak their thoughts more boldly.  But there was in More a want of confidence in human nature, a scorn of the follies of his fellow creatures which, as he became more earnestly religious, narrowed and hardened his convictions, and transformed the genial philosopher into the merciless bigot.  “Heresy” was naturally hateful to him; his mind was too clear and genuine to allow him to deceive himself with the delusions of Anglicanism; and as he saw the inevitable tendency of the Reformation to lead ultimately to a change of doctrine, he attached himself with increasing determination to the cause of the pope and of the old faith.  As if with an instinctive prescience of what would follow from it, he had from the first been opposed to the divorce; and he had not concealed his feeling from the king at the time when the latter had pressed the seals on his unwilling acceptance.  In consenting to become chancellor, he had yielded only to Henry’s entreaties; he had held his office for two years and a half—­and it would have been well for his memory if he had been constant in his refusal—­for in his ineffectual struggles against the stream, he had attempted to counterpoise the attack upon the church by destroying the unhappy Protestants.  At the close of the session, however, the acts of which we have just described, he felt that he must no longer countenance, by remaining in an office so near to the crown, measures which he so intensely disapproved and deplored; it was time for him to retire from a world not moving to his mind; and in the fair tranquillity of his family prepare himself for the evil days which he foresaw.  In May, 1532, he petitioned for permission to resign, resting his request unobtrusively on failing health; and Henry sadly consented to lose his services.