e acts of supremacy
and succession; the general drift of reform, and the iniquity of the
monks. They fell from natural causes and through the operation of laws
which God alone controls. As Hill neatly puts it, "Monasticism was
healthy, active and vigorous; it became idle, listless and extravagant;
it engendered its own corruption, and out of that corruption
came death."

Richard Bagot, a Catholic, in a recent article on the question, "Will
England become Catholic?" which was published in the "Nuova Antologia,"
says: "Though it is impossible not to blame the so-called Reformers for
the acts of sacrilege and barbarism through which they obtained the
religious and political liberty so necessary to the intellectual and
social progress of the race, it cannot be denied that no sooner had the
power of the papacy come to an end in England than the English nation
entered upon that free development which has at last brought it to its
present position among the other nations of the world." Mr. Bagot also
admits that "the political intrigues and insatiable ambition of the
papacy during the succeeding centuries constituted a perpetual menace
to England."

The true view, therefore, is that two types of religious and political
life, two epochs of human history, met in Henry's reign. The king and
the pope were the exponents of conflicting ideals. The fall of the
monasteries was an incident in the struggle. "The Catholics," says
Froude, "had chosen the alternative, either to crush the free thought
which was bursting from the soil, or to be crushed by it; and the future
of the world could not be sacrificed to preserve the exotic graces of
medieval saints."

The problem is reduced to this, Was the Reformation desirable? Is
Protestantism a curse or a blessing? Would England and the world be
better off under the sway of medieval religion than under the influence
of modern Protestantism? If monasticism were a fetter on human liberty
and industry, if the monasteries were "so many seminaries of
superstition and of folly," there was but one thing to do--to break the
fetters and to destroy the monasteries. To have succeeded in so radical
a reform as that begun by King Henry, with forty thousand monks
preaching treason, would have been an impossibility. Henry cannot be
blamed because the monks chose to entangle themselves with politics and
to side with Rome as against the English nation.

_Results of the Dissolution_

Many important re