heir retinues. This
is hardly the way to make real the teaching of "the kingdom not of this
world." This world, in the meaning of that saying, is the old world of
egotism, of self-assertion, of selfish rivalry, of the sense of
separation. The kingdom is that very realm of humane and universal
consciousness added from above, the sense of the one soul common to all
men and working through all men, whether they know it or not.

We can, therefore, see that the confiscation of the monasteries, and
even the persecution of the religious orders, might be the cause of
lasting spiritual good; it was like the opening of granaries and the
scattering of grain abroad over the fields. The religious force, instead
of drawing men out of the world, thenceforth was compelled to work among
all men, not creating beautiful abbeys but transforming common lives.
Persecution was the safeguard of sincerity, the fire of purification,
from which men's spirits came forth pure gold. Among all nations of the
world, Ireland has long held the first place for pure morals, especially
in the relations of sex; and this is increasingly true of those
provinces where the old indigenous element is most firmly established.
We may affirm that the spiritualizing of religious feeling through
persecution has had its share in bringing this admirable result,
working, as it did, on a race which has ever held a high ideal
of purity.

Thus out of evil comes good; out of oppression, rapacity and
confiscation grow pure unselfishness, an unworldly ideal, a sense of the
invisible realm. We shall presently see the same forces of rapacity and
avarice sowing the seeds for a not less excellent harvest in the world
of civil life.

The principle of feudalism, though introduced by the first Norman
adventurers in the twelfth century, did not gain legal recognition over
the whole country until the seventeenth. The old communal tenure of the
Brehon law was gradually superseded, so that, instead of innumerable
tribal territories with elected chiefs, there grew up a system of
estates, where the land was owned by one man and tilled by others. The
germ of this tenure was the right of private taxation over certain
districts, granted by the Norman duke to his barons and warriors as the
reward for their help in battle. Feudal land tenure never was, and never
pretended to be, a contract between cultivator and landowner for their
mutual benefit. It was rather the right to prey on the farme