On The Bond Of Christian Charity

The “Reformation” despoiled the working classes of their patrimony; it tore from them that which nature and reason had assigned them; it robbed them of that relief for the necessitous, which was theirs by right imprescriptible, and which had been confirmed to them by the law of God and the law of the land. It brought a compulsory, a grudging, an unnatural mode of relief, calculated to make the poor and rich hate each other, instead of binding them together, as the Catholic mode did, by the bonds of christian charity.

— William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland