The higher dignities of the church served, indeed, to the support of gentry and nobility; but by the establishment of monasteries, many of the lowest vulgar were taken from the useful arts, and maintained in those receptacles of sloth and ignorance.

The supreme head of the church was a foreign potentate, guided by interests always different from those of the community, sometimes contrary to them.

And as the hierarchy was necessarily solicitous to preserve a unity of faith, rites, and ceremonies, all liberty of thought ran a manifest risk of being extinguished; and violent persecutions, or, what was worse, a stupid and abject credulity, took place every where.
To increase these evils, the Church, though she possessed large revenues, was not contented with her acquisitions, but retained a power of practising further on the ignorance of mankind.

She even bestowed on each individual priest a power of enriching himself by the voluntary oblations of the faithful, and left him still an urgent motive for diligence and industry in his calling.

And thus that church, though an expensive and burdensome establishment, was liable to many of the inconveniences which belong to an order of priests, trusting entirely to their own art and invention for obtaining a subsistence.
The advantages attending the Romish hierarchy were but a small compensation for its inconveniences.