sins of monastic life, violent as they
often are. They cannot possibly be more violent than the letters of St.
Paul to the purest and most primitive churches; the apostle was there
writing to those Early Christians whom all churches idealize; and he
talks to them as to cut-throats and thieves. The explanation, for those
concerned for such subtleties, may possibly be found in the fact that
Christianity is not a creed for good men, but for men. Such letters had
been written in all centuries; and even in the sixteenth century they do
not prove so much that there were bad abbots as that there were good
bishops. Moreover, even those who profess that the monks were
profligates dare not profess that they were oppressors; there is truth
in Cobbett's point that where monks were landlords, they did not become
rack-renting landlords, and could not become absentee landlords.
Nevertheless, there was a weakness in the good institutions as well as a
mere strength in the bad ones; and that weakness partakes of the worst
element of the time. In the fall of good things there is almost always a
touch of betrayal from within; and the abbots were destroyed more easily
because they did not stand together. They did not stand together because
the spirit of the age (which is very often the worst enemy of the age)
was the increasing division between rich and poor; and it had partly
divided even the rich and poor clergy. And the betrayal came, as it
nearly always comes, from that servant of Christ who holds the bag.

To take a modern attack on liberty, on a much lower plane, we are
familiar with the picture of a politician going to the great brewers, or
even the great hotel proprietors, and pointing out the uselessness of a
litter of little public-houses. That is what the Tudor politicians did
first with the monasteries. They went to the heads of the great houses
and proposed the extinction of the small ones. The great monastic lords
did not resist, or, at any rate, did not resist enough; and the sack of
the religious houses began. But if the lord abbots acted for a moment as
lords, that could not excuse them, in the eyes of much greater lords,
for having frequently acted as abbots. A momentary rally to the cause of
the rich did not wipe out the disgrace of a thousand petty interferences
which had told only to the advantage of the poor; and they were soon to
learn that it was no epoch for their easy rule and their careless
hospitality. The great h