of
London. The archbishop had ample means of ascertaining the truth; and,
we may be sure, had taken care to examine his ground before he left on
record so tremendous an accusation. This story is true--as true as it is
piteous. We will pause a moment over it before we pass from this, once
more to ask our passionate Church friends whether still they will
persist that the abbeys were no worse under the Tudors than they had
been in their origin, under the Saxons, or under the first Norman and
Plantagenet kings. We refuse to believe it. The abbeys which towered in
the midst of the English towns, the houses clustered at their feet like
subjects round some majestic queen, were images indeed of the civil
supremacy which the Church of the Middle Ages had asserted for itself;
but they were images also of an inner spiritual sublimity, which had won
the homage of grateful and admiring nations. The heavenly graces had
once descended upon the monastic orders, making them ministers of mercy,
patterns of celestial life, breathing witnesses of the power of the
Spirit in renewing and sanctifying the heart. And then it was that art
and wealth and genius poured out their treasures to raise fitting
tabernacles for the dwelling of so divine a soul. Alike in the village
and the city, amongst the unadorned walls and lowly roofs which closed
in the humble dwellings of the laity, the majestic houses of the Father
of mankind and of his especial servants rose up in sovereign beauty.
And ever at the sacred gates sat 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 such blessed influences were
thought to exhale around those mysterious precincts, that even the poor
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. The abbeys of the middle ages floated through the
storms of war and conquest, like the ark upon the waves of the flood, in
the midst of violence remaining inviolate, through the awful reverence
which surrounded them. The abbeys, as Henry's visitors found them, were
as little like what they once had been, as the living man in the pride
of his growth is like the corpse which the earth makes haste to hide for