olics do not much approve of them. They do not venture to say much
on the subject directly, but they allow themselves a certain
good-humoured ridicule. A Spanish novelist of some reputation tells a
story of a man coming to a priest on one of these occasions, putting a
shilling in the plate, and giving in the name of his friend.

'Is my friend's soul out?' he asked. The priest said it was. 'Quite
sure?' the man asked. 'Quite sure,' the priest answered. 'Very well,'
said the man, 'if he is out of purgatory they will not put him in again:
it is a bad shilling.'

Sadder than all else, even as the most beautiful things are worst in
their degradation, was the condition of the monasteries. I am here on
delicate ground. The accounts of those institutions, as they existed in
England and Germany at the time of their suppression, is so shocking
that even impartial writers have hesitated to believe the reports which
have come down to us. The laity, we are told, determined to appropriate
the abbey lands, and maligned the monks to justify the spoliation. Were
the charge true, the religious orders would still be without excuse, for
the whole education of the country was in the hands of the clergy; and
they had allowed a whole generation to grow up, which, on this
hypothesis, was utterly depraved.

But no such theory can explain away the accumulated testimony which
comes to us--exactly alike--from so many sides and witnesses. We are not
dependent upon evidence which Catholics can decline to receive. In the
reign of our Henry the Seventh the notorious corruption of some of the
great abbeys in England brought them under the notice of the Catholic
Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton. The archbishop, unable to
meddle with them by his own authority, obtained the necessary powers
from the Pope. He instituted a partial visitation in the neighbourhood
of London; and the most malignant Protestant never drew such a picture
of profligate brutality as Cardinal Morton left behind him in his
Register, in a description of the great Abbey of St. Albans. I cannot,
in a public lecture, give you the faintest idea of what it contains. The
monks were bound to celibacy--that is to say, they were not allowed to
marry. They were full-fed, idle, and sensual; of sin they thought only
as something extremely pleasant, of which they could cleanse one another
with a few mumbled words as easily as they could wash their faces in a
basin. And there I must leav