or religious reform. Indeed it is a fair question
whether Henry may be claimed by the Protestants at all. Aside from his
rejection of the pope's authority, he was thoroughly Catholic in
conviction and in practice. His impatience with the pope's position
respecting his divorce, his need of money, his love of power, and many
other personal considerations determined his attitude toward
the papacy.

It should also be freely conceded that the royal commissioners were far
from exemplary characters, and that they were often insolent and cruel
in the prosecution of their work.

"Our posterity," says John Bale, "may well curse this wicked fact of our
age; this unreasonable spoil of England's most noble antiquities." "On
the whole," says Blunt, "it may be said that we must ever look back on
that destruction as a series of transactions in which the sorrow, the
waste, the impiety that were wrought, were enough to make the angels
weep. It may be true that the monastic system had worn itself out for
practical good; or at least, that it was unfitted for those coming ages
which were to be so different from the ages that were past. But
slaughter, desecration and wanton destruction, were no remedies for its
sins, or its failings; nor was covetous rapacity the spirit of
reformation."

Hume observes that "during times of faction, especially of a religious
kind, no equity is to be expected from adversaries; and as it was known
that the king's intention in this visitation was to find a pretext for
abolishing the monasteries, we may naturally conclude that the reports
of the commissioners are very little to be relied upon." Hallam declares
that "it is impossible to feel too much indignation at the spirit in
which the proceedings were conducted."

But these and other just and honorable concessions in the interests of
truth, which are to be found on the pages of eminent Protestant
historians, are made to prove too much. It must be said that writers
favorable to monasticism take an unfair advantage of these admissions,
which simply testify to a spirit of candor and a love of truth, but do
not contain the final conclusions of these historians. Employing these
witnesses to confirm their opinions, the defenders of monasticism
proceed with fervid, glowing rhetoric, breathing devotion and love on
every page, to paint the sorrows and ruin of the Carthusian Fathers, and
the abbots of Glastonbury and Reading. They ask, "Is this your boasted
freedom