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 ever.

The official letters which reveal the condition into
which the monastic establishments had degenerated, are
chiefly in the Cotton Library, and a large number of
them have been published by the Camden Society.
Besides these, however, there are in the Rolls House
many other documents which confirm and complete the
statements of the writers of those letters. There is a
part of what seems to have been a digest of the Black
Book--an epitome of iniquities, under the title of the
Compendium Compertorum. There are also reports
from private persons, private entreaties for inquiry,
depositio