n sovereign beauty, symbols of the
civil supremacy of the church, and of the moral sublimity of life and
character which had won the homage and the admiration of the Christian
nations. Ever at the sacred gates sate Mercy, pouring out relief from a
never-failing store to the poor and the suffering; ever within the
sacred aisles the voices of holy men were pealing heavenwards, in
intercession for the sins of mankind; and influences so blessed were
thought to exhale around those mysterious precincts, that the outcasts
of society--the debtor, the felon, and the outlaw--gathered round the
walls, as the sick men sought the shadow of the apostle, and lay there
sheltered from the avenging hand till their sins were washed from off
their souls. Through the storms of war and conquest the abbeys of the
middle ages floated, like the ark upon the waves of the flood, inviolate
in the midst of violence, through the awful reverence which surrounded
them.

[Sidenote: The life of "religion" left it in the 14th century.]

The soul of "religion,"[482] however, had died out of it for many
generations before the Reformation. At the close of the fourteenth
century, Wycliffe had cried that the rotting trunk cumbered the ground,
and should be cut down. It had not been cut down; it had been allowed to
stand for a hundred and fifty more years; and now it was indeed plain
that it could remain no longer. The boughs were bare, the stem was
withered, the veins were choked with corruption; the ancient life-tree
of monasticism would blossom and bear fruit no more. Faith had sunk into
superstition; duty had died into routine; and the monks, whose technical
discipline was forgotten, and who were set free by their position from
the discipline of ordinary duty, had travelled swiftly on the downhill
road of human corruption.

[Sidenote: The darker scandals not to be touched upon.]

[Sidenote: Political and administrative abuses.]

Only light reference will be made in this place to the darker scandals
by which the abbeys were dishonoured. Such things there really were, to
an extent which it may be painful to believe, but which evidence too
abundantly proves. It is better, however, to bury the recollection of
the more odious forms of human depravity; and so soon as those who
condemn the Reformation have ceased to deny what the painfulness of the
subject only has allowed to remain disputed, the sins of the last
English monks will sleep with them in their t