Chapter XIII: Front Matter (13)

There is, however, another group of feelings which cannot be set aside in this way, which do prove that, in some sense or other, in some degree or other, we are the authors of our own actions. It is one of the clearest of all inward phenomena, that, where two or more courses involving moral issues are before us, whether we have a consciousness of _power_ to choose between them or not, we have a consciousness that we _ought_ to choose between them; a sense of duty--[Greek: hoti dei touto prattein]--as Aristotle expresses it, which we cannot shake off. Whatever this consciousness involves (and some measure of freedom it must involve or it is nonsense), the feeling exists within us, and refuses to yield before all the batteries of logic. It is not that of the two courses we know that one is in the long run the best, and the other more immediately tempting. We have a sense of obligation irrespective of consequence, the violation of which is followed again by a sense of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the theory of powerlessness, are mistakes arising out of a false philosophy. They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by logic, the paralysis of the conscience is no more a proof that it is not a real power of perceiving real things, than blindness is a proof that sight is not a real power. The perceptions of worth and worthlessness are not conclusions of reasoning, but immediate sensations like those of seeing and hearing; and although, like the other senses, they may be mistaken sometimes in the accounts they render to us, the fact of the existence of such feelings at all proves that there is something which corresponds to them. If there be any such things as 'true ideas,' or clear, distinct perceptions at all, this of praise and blame is one of them, and according to Spinoza's own rule we must accept what it involves. And it involves that some where or other the influence of causes ceases to operate, and that some degree of power there is in men of self-determination, by the amount of which, and not by their specific actions, moral merit or demerit is to be measured. Speculative difficulties remain in abundance. It will be said in a case, _e.g._ of moral trial, that there may have been _power_; but was there _power enough_ to resist the temptation? If there was, then it was resisted. If there was not, there was no responsibility. We must answer again from practical instinct. We refuse to allow men to be considered all equally guilty who have committed the same faults; and we insist that their actions must be measured against their opportunities. But a similar conviction assures us that there is somewhere a point of freedom. Where that point is--where other influences terminate, and responsibility begins--will always be of intricate and often impossible solution. But if there be such a point at all, it is fatal to necessitarianism, and man is what he has been hitherto supposed to be--an exception in the order of nature, with a power not differing in degree but differing in kind from those of other creatures. Moral life, like all life, is a mystery; and as to anatomise the body will not reveal the secret of animation, so with the actions of the moral man. The spiritual life, which alone gives them meaning and being, glides away before the logical dissecting knife, and leaves it but a corpse to work upon.

FOOTNOTES:

[N] _Westminster Review_, 1854.

[O] Since these words were written a book has appeared in Paris by an able disciple of Leibnitz, which, although it does not lead us to modify the opinion expressed in them, yet obliges us to give our reasons for speaking as we do. M. de Careil[P] has discovered in the library at Hanover, a MS. in the hand-writing of Leibnitz, containing a series of remarks on the book of a certain John Wachter. It does not appear who this John Wachter was, nor by what accident he came to have so distinguished a critic. If we may judge by the extracts at present before us, he seems to have been an absurd and extravagant person, who had attempted to combine the theology of the Cabbala with the very little which he was able to understand of the philosophy of Spinoza; and, as far as he is concerned, neither his writings nor the reflections upon them are of interest to any human being. The extravagance of Spinoza's followers, however, furnished Leibnitz with an opportunity of noticing the points on which he most disapproved of Spinoza himself; and these few notices M. de Careil has now for the first time published as _The Refutation of Spinoza_, by Leibnitz. They are exceedingly brief and scanty; and the writer of them would assuredly have hesitated to describe an imperfect criticism by so ambitious a title. The modern editor, however, must be allowed the privilege of a worshipper, and we will not quarrel with him for an exaggerated estimate of what his master had accomplished. We are indebted to his enthusiasm for what is at least a curious discovery, and we will not qualify the gratitude which he has earned by industry and good will. At the same time, the notes themselves confirm the opinion which we have always entertained, that Leibnitz did not understand Spinoza. Leibnitz did not understand him, and the followers of Leibnitz do not understand him now. If he were no more than what he is described in the book before us--if his metaphysics were 'miserable,' if his philosophy was absurd, and he himself nothing more than a second-rate disciple of Descartes--we can assure M. de Careil that we should long ago have heard the last of him.

There must be something else, something very different from this, to explain the position which he holds in Germany, or the fascination which his writings exerted over such minds as those of Lessing or of Göthe; the fact of so enduring an influence is more than a sufficient answer to mere depreciating criticism. This, however, is not a point which there is any use in pressing. Our present business is to justify the two assertions which we have made. First, that Leibnitz borrowed his _Theory of the Harmonie Pré-établie_ from Spinoza, without acknowledgment; and, secondly, that this theory is quite as inconsistent with religion as is that of Spinoza, and only differs from it in disguising its real character.

First for the _Harmonie Pré-établie_. Spinoza's _Ethics_ appeared in 1677; and we know that they were read by Leibnitz. In 1696, Leibnitz announced as a discovery of his own, a Theory of _The Communication of Substances_, which he illustrates in the following manner:--

'Vous ne comprenez pas, dites-vous, comment je pourrois prouver ce que j'ai avancé touchant la communication, ou l'harmonie de deux substances aussi différentes que l'âme et le corps? Il est vrai que je crois en avoir trouvé le moyen; et voici comment je prétends vous satisfaire. Figurez-vous deux horloges ou montres qui s'accordent parfaitement. Or cela se peut faire de trois manières. La 1^{e} consiste dans une influence mutuelle. La 2^{e} est d'y attacher un ouvrier habile qui les redresse, et les mette d'accord à tous moments. La 3^{e} est de fabriquer ces deux pendules avec tant d'art et de justesse, qu'on se puisse assurer de leur accord dans la suite. Mettez maintenant l'âme et le corps à la place de ces deux pendules; leur accord peut arriver par l'une de ces trois manières. La voye d'influence est celle de la philosophie vulgaire; mais comme l'on ne sauroit concevoir des particules matérielles qui puissent passer d'une de ces substances dans l'autre, il faut abandonner ce sentiment. La voye de l'assistance continuelle du Créateur est celle du système des causes occasionnelles; mais je tiens que c'est faire intervenir Deus ex machinâ, dans une chose naturelle et ordinaire, où selon la raison il ne doit concourir, que do la manière qu'il concourt à toutes les autres choses naturelles. Ainsi il ne reste que mon hypothèse; c'est-à-dire que la voye de l'harmonie. Dieu a fait dès le commencement chacune de ces deux substances de telle nature, qu'en ne suivant que ces propres loix qu'elle a reçues avec son être, elle s'accorde pourtant avec l'autre tout comme s'il y avoit une influence mutuelle, ou comme si Dieu y mettoit toujours la main au-delà de son concours général. Après cela je n'ai pas besoin de rien prouver à moins qu'on ne veuille exiger que je prouve que Dieu est assez habile pour se servir de cette artifice,' &c.--LEIBNITZ, _Opera_, p. 133. Berlin edition, 1840.

Leibnitz, as we have said, attempts to reconcile his system with Christianity, and therefore, of course, this theory of the relation of mind and body wears a very different aspect under his treatment, from what it wears under that of Spinoza. But Spinoza and Leibnitz both agree in this one peculiar conception in which they differ from all other philosophers before or after them--that mind and body have no direct communication with each other, and that the phenomena of them merely correspond. M. de Careil says they both borrowed it from Descartes; but that is impossible. Descartes held no such opinion; it was the precise point of disagreement at which Spinoza parted from him; and therefore, since in point of date Spinoza had the advantage of Leibnitz, and we know that Leibnitz was acquainted with his writings, we must either suppose that he was directly indebted to Spinoza for an obligation which he ought to have acknowledged, or else, which is extremely improbable, that having read Spinoza and forgotten him, he afterwards re-originated for himself one of the most singular and peculiar notions which was ever offered to the belief of mankind.

So much for the first point, which, after all, is but of little moment. It is more important to ascertain whether, in the hands of Leibnitz, this theory can be any better reconciled with what is commonly meant by religion; whether, that is, the ideas of obedience and disobedience, merit and demerit, judgment and retribution, have any proper place under it. Spinoza makes no pretension to anything of the kind, and openly declares that these ideas are ideas merely, and human mistakes. Leibnitz, in opposition to him, endeavours to re-establish them in the following manner. He conceives that the system of the universe has been arranged and predetermined from the moment at which it was launched into being; from the moment at which God selected it, with all its details, as the best which could exist; but that it is carried on by the action of individual creatures (monads as he calls them) which, though necessarily obeying the laws of their existence, yet obey them with a 'character of spontaneity,' which although 'automata,' are yet voluntary agents; and therefore, by the consent of their hearts to their actions, entitle themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is, whether by the mere assertion of the co-existence of these opposite qualities in the monad man, he has proved that such qualities can co-exist. In our opinion, it is like speaking of a circular ellipse, or of a quadrilateral triangle. There is a plain dilemma in these matters from which no philosophy can extricate itself. If men can incur guilt, their actions might be other than they are. If they cannot act otherwise than they do, they cannot incur guilt. So at least it appears to us; yet, in the darkness of our knowledge, we would not complain merely of a theory, and if our earthly life were all in all, and the grave remained the extreme horizon of our hopes and fears, the _Harmonie Pré-établie_ might be tolerated as credible, and admired as ingenious and beautiful. It is when forcibly attached to a creed of the future, with which it has no natural connection, that it assumes its repulsive features. The world may be in the main good; while the good, from the unknown condition of its existence, may be impossible without some intermixture of evil; and although Leibnitz was at times staggered even himself by the misery and wickedness which he witnessed, and was driven to comfort himself with the reflection that this earth might be but one world in the midst of the universe, and perhaps the single chequered exception in an infinity of stainless globes, yet we would not quarrel with a hypothesis because it was imperfect; it might pass as a possible conjecture on a dark subject, when nothing better than conjecture was attainable.

But as soon as we are told that the evil in these human 'automata' being a necessary condition of this world which God has called into being, is yet infinitely detestable to God; that the creatures who suffer under the accursed necessity of committing sin are infinitely guilty in God's eyes, for doing what they have no power to avoid, and may therefore be justly punished in everlasting fire; we recoil against the paradox.

No disciple of Leibnitz will maintain, that unless he had found this belief in an eternity of penal retribution an article of the popular creed, such a doctrine would have formed a natural appendage of his system; and if M. de Careil desires to know why the influence of Spinoza, whose genius he considers so insignificant, has been so deep and so enduring, while Leibnitz has only secured for himself a mere admiration of his talents, it is because Spinoza was not afraid to be consistent, even at the price of the world's reprobation, and refused to purchase the applause of his own age at the sacrifice of sincerity.

[P] _Réfutation Inédite de Spinoza._ Par Leibnitz. _Précédée d'une Mémoire_, par Foucher de Careil. Paris. 1854.

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES.[Q]

To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult--it is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own, before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it.

And in historical enquiries, the most instructed thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most, approach least to agreement. The most careful investigations are diverging roads--the further men travel upon them, the greater the interval by which they are divided. In the eyes of David Hume, the history of the Saxon Princes is 'the scuffling of kites and crows.' Father Newman would mortify the conceit of a degenerate England by pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred confessors who were trained in her royal palaces for the Calendar of the Blessed. How vast a chasm yawns between these two conceptions of the same era! Through what common term can the student pass from one into the other?

Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable. The history of England scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay before the Revolution of the seventeenth century. To Lord John Russell, the Reformation was the first outcome from centuries of folly and ferocity; and Mr. Hallam's more temperate language softens, without concealing, a similar conclusion. These writers have all studied what they describe. Mr. Carlyle has studied the same subject with power at least equal to theirs, and to him the greatness of English character was waning with the dawn of English literature; the race of heroes was already failing. The era of action was yielding before the era of speech.

All these views may seem to ourselves exaggerated; we may have settled into some moderate _via media_, or have carved out our own ground on an original pattern; but if we are wise, the differences in other men's judgments will teach us to be diffident. The more distinctly we have made history bear witness in favour of our particular opinions, the more we have multiplied the chances against the truth of our own theory.

Again, supposing that we have made a truce with 'opinions,' properly so called; supposing we have satisfied ourselves that it is idle to quarrel upon points on which good men differ, and that it is better to attend rather to what we certainly know; supposing that, either from superior wisdom, or from the conceit of superior wisdom, we have resolved that we will look for human perfection neither exclusively in the Old World nor exclusively in the New--neither among Catholics nor Protestants, among Whigs or Tories, heathens or Christians--that we have laid aside accidental differences, and determined to recognise only moral distinctions, to love moral worth, and to hate moral evil, wherever we find them;--even supposing all this, we have not much improved our position--we cannot leap from our shadow.

Eras, like individuals, differ from one another in the species of virtue which they encourage. In one age, we find the virtues of the warrior; in the next, of the saint. The ascetic and the soldier in their turn disappear; an industrial era succeeds, bringing with it the virtues of common sense, of grace, and refinement. There is the virtue of energy and command, there is the virtue of humility and patient suffering. All these are different, and all are, or may be, of equal moral value; yet, from the constitution of our minds, we are so framed that we cannot equally appreciate all; we sympathise instinctively with the person who most represents our own ideal--with the period when the graces which most harmonise with our own tempers have been especially cultivated. Further, if we leave out of sight these refinements, and content ourselves with the most popular conceptions of morality, there is this immeasurable difficulty--so great, yet so little considered,--that goodness is positive as well as negative, and consists in the active accomplishment of certain things which we are bound to do, as well as in the abstaining from things which we are bound not to do. And here the warp and woof vary in shade and pattern. Many a man, with the help of circumstances, may pick his way clear through life, never having violated one prohibitive commandment, and yet at last be fit only for the place of the unprofitable servant--he may not have committed either sin or crime, yet never have felt the pulsation of a single unselfish emotion. Another, meanwhile, shall have been hurried by an impulsive nature into fault after fault--shall have been reckless, improvident, perhaps profligate, yet be fitter after all for the kingdom of heaven than the Pharisee--fitter, because against the catalogue of faults there could perhaps be set a fairer list of acts of comparative generosity and self-forgetfulness--fitter, because to those who love much, much is forgiven. Fielding had no occasion to make Blifil, behind his decent coat, a traitor and a hypocrite. It would have been enough to have coloured him in and out alike in the steady hues of selfishness, afraid of offending the upper powers as he was afraid of offending Allworthy--not from any love for what was good, but solely because it would be imprudent--because the pleasure to be gained was not worth the risk of consequences. Such a Blifil would have answered the novelist's purpose--for he would have remained a worse man in the estimation of some of us than Tom Jones.

So the truth is; but unfortunately it is only where accurate knowledge is stimulated by affection, that we are able to feel it. Persons who live beyond our own circle, and, still more, persons who have lived in another age, receive what is called justice, not charity; and justice is supposed to consist in due allotments of censure for each special act of misconduct, leaving merit unrecognised. There are many reasons for this harsh method of judging. We must decide of men by what we know, and it is easier to know faults than to know virtues. Faults are specific, easily described, easily appreciated, easily remembered. And again, there is, or may be, hypocrisy in virtue; but no one pretends to vice who is not vicious. The bad things which can be proved of a man we know to be genuine. He was a spendthrift, he was an adulterer, he gambled, he equivocated. These are blots positive, unless untrue, and when they stand alone, tinge the whole character.

This also is to be observed in historical criticism. All men feel a necessity of being on some terms with their conscience, at their own expense or at another's. If they cannot part with their faults, they will at least call them by their right name when they meet with such faults elsewhere; and thus, when they find accounts of deeds of violence or sensuality, of tyranny, of injustice of man to man, of great and extensive suffering, or any of those other misfortunes which the selfishness of men has at various times occasioned, they will vituperate the doers of such things, and the age which has permitted them to be done, with the full emphasis of virtuous indignation, while all the time they are themselves doing things which will be described, with no less justice, in the same colour, by an equally virtuous posterity.

Historians are fond of recording the supposed sufferings of the poor in the days of serfdom and villanage; yet the records of the strikes of the last ten years, when told by the sufferers, contain pictures no less fertile in tragedy. We speak of famines and plagues under the Tudors and Stuarts; but the Irish famine, and the Irish plague of 1847, the last page of such horrors which has yet been turned over, is the most horrible of all. We can conceive a description of England during the year which has just closed over us (1856), true in all its details, containing no one statement which can be challenged, no single exaggeration which can be proved; and this description, if given without the correcting traits, shall make ages to come marvel why the Cities of the Plain were destroyed, and England was allowed to survive. The frauds of trusted men, high in power and high in supposed religion; the wholesale poisonings; the robberies; the adulteration of food--nay, of almost everything exposed for sale--the cruel usage of women--children murdered for the burial fees--life and property insecure in open day in the open streets--splendour such as the world never saw before upon earth, with vice and squalor crouching under its walls--let all this be written down by an enemy, or let it be ascertained hereafter by the investigation of a posterity which desires to judge us as we generally have judged our forefathers, and few years will show darker in the English annals than the year which we have just left behind us. Yet we know, in the honesty of our hearts, how unjust such a picture would be. Our future advocate, if we are so happy as to find one, may not be able to disprove a single article in the indictment; and yet we know that, as the world goes, he will be right if he marks the year with a white stroke--as one in which, on the whole, the moral harvest was better than an average.

Once more: our knowledge of any man is always inadequate--even of the unit which each of us calls himself; and the first condition under which we can know a man at all is, that he be in essentials something like ourselves; that our own experience be an interpreter which shall open the secrets of his experience; and it often happens, even among our contemporaries, that we are altogether baffled. The Englishman and the Italian may understand each other's speech, but the language of each other's ideas has still to be learnt. Our long failures in Ireland have risen from a radical incongruity of character which has divided the Celt from the Saxon. And again, in the same country, the Catholic will be a mystery to the Protestant, and the Protestant to the Catholic. Their intellects have been shaped in opposite moulds; they are like instruments which cannot be played in concert. In the same way, but in a far higher degree, we are divided from the generations which have preceded us in this planet--we try to comprehend a Pericles or a Cæsar--an image rises before us which we seem to recognise as belonging to our common humanity. There is this feature which is familiar to us--and this--and this. We are full of hope; the lineaments, one by one, pass into clearness; when suddenly the figure becomes enveloped in a cloud--some perplexity crosses our analysis, baffling it utterly, the phantom which we have evoked dies away before our eyes, scornfully mocking our incapacity to master it.

The English antecedent to the Reformation are nearer to us than Greeks or Romans; and yet there is a large interval between the baron who fought at Barnet field, and his polished descendant in a modern drawing-room. The scale of appreciation and the rule of judgment--the habits, the hopes, the fears, the emotions--have utterly changed.

In perusing modern histories, the present writer has been struck dumb with wonder at the facility with which men will fill in chasms in their information with conjecture; will guess at the motives which have prompted actions; will pass their censures, as if all secrets of the past lay out on an open scroll before them. He is obliged to say for himself that, wherever he has been fortunate enough to discover authentic explanations of English historical difficulties, it is rare indeed that he has found any conjecture, either of his own or of any other modern writer, confirmed. The true motive has almost invariably been of a kind which no modern experience could have suggested.

Thoughts such as these form a hesitating prelude to an expression of opinion on a controverted question. They will serve, however, to indicate the limits within which the said opinion is supposed to be hazarded. And in fact, neither in this nor in any historical subject is the conclusion so clear that it can be enunciated in a definite form. The utmost which can be safely hazarded with history is to relate honestly ascertained facts, with only such indications of a judicial sentence upon them as may be suggested in the form in which the story is arranged.

Whether the monastic bodies of England, at the time of their dissolution, were really in that condition of moral corruption which is laid to their charge in the Act of Parliament by which they were dissolved, is a point which it seems hopeless to argue. Roman Catholic, and indeed almost all English, writers who are not committed to an unfavourable opinion by the ultra-Protestantism of their doctrines, seem to have agreed of late years that the accusations, if not false, were enormously exaggerated. The dissolution, we are told, was a predetermined act of violence and rapacity; and when the reports and the letters of the visitors are quoted in justification of the Government, the discussion is closed with the dismissal of every unfavourable witness from the court, as venal, corrupt, calumnious--in fact, as a suborned liar. Upon these terms the argument is easily disposed of; and if it were not that truth is in all matters better than falsehood, it would be idle to reopen a question which cannot be justly dealt with. No evidence can affect convictions which have been arrived at without evidence--and why should we attempt a task which it is hopeless to accomplish? It seems necessary, however, to reassert the actual state of the surviving testimony from time to time, if it be only to sustain the links of the old traditions; and the present paper will contain one or two pictures of a peculiar kind, exhibiting the life and habits of those institutions, which have been lately met with chiefly among the unprinted Records. In anticipation of any possible charge of unfairness in judging from isolated instances, we disclaim simply all desire to judge--all wish to do anything beyond relating certain ascertained stories. Let it remain, to those who are perverse enough to insist upon it, an open question whether the monasteries were more corrupt under Henry the Eighth than they had been four hundred years earlier. The dissolution would have been equally a necessity; for no reasonable person would desire that bodies of men should have been maintained for the only business of singing masses, when the efficacy of masses was no longer believed. Our present desire is merely this--to satisfy ourselves whether the Government, in discharging a duty which could not be dispensed with, condescended to falsehood in seeking a vindication for themselves which they did not require; or whether they had cause really to believe the majority of the monastic bodies to be as they affirmed--whether, that is to say, there really were such cases either of flagrant immorality, neglect of discipline, or careless waste and prodigality, as to justify the general censure which was pronounced against the system by the Parliament and the Privy Council.

Secure in the supposed completeness with which Queen Mary's agents destroyed the Records of the visitation under her father, Roman Catholic writers have taken refuge in a disdainful denial; and the Anglicans, who for the most part, while contented to enjoy the fruits of the Reformation, detest the means by which it was brought about, have taken the same view. Bishop Latimer tells us that, when the Report of the visitors of the abbeys was read in the Commons House, there rose from all sides one long cry of 'Down with them.' But Bishop Latimer, in the opinion of High Churchmen, is not to be believed. Do we produce letters of the visitors themselves, we are told that they are the slanders prepared to justify a preconceived purpose of spoliation. No witness, it seems, will be admitted unless it be the witness of a friend. Unless some enemy of the Reformation can be found to confess the crimes which made the Reformation necessary, the crimes themselves are to be regarded as unproved. This is a hard condition. We appeal to Wolsey. Wolsey commenced the suppression. Wolsey first made public the infamies which disgraced the Church; while, notwithstanding, he died the devoted servant of the Church. This evidence is surely admissible? But no: Wolsey, too, must be put out of court. Wolsey was a courtier and a time-server. Wolsey was a tyrant's minion. Wolsey was--in short, we know not what Wolsey was, or what he was not. Who can put confidence in a charlatan? Behind the bulwarks of such objections, the champion of the abbeys may well believe himself secure.

And yet, unreasonable though these demands may be, it happens, after all, that we are able partially to gratify them. It is strange that, of all extant accusations against any one of the abbeys, the heaviest is from a quarter which even Lingard himself would scarcely call suspicious. No picture left us by Henry's visitors surpasses, even if it equals, a description of the condition of the Abbey of St. Albans, in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, drawn by Morton, Henry the Seventh's minister, Cardinal Archbishop, Legate of the Apostolic See, in a letter addressed by him to the Abbot of St. Albans himself. We must request our reader's special attention for the next two pages.

In the year 1489, Pope Innocent the Eighth--moved with the enormous stories which reached his ear of the corruption of the houses of religion in England--granted a commission to the Archbishop of Canterbury to make enquiries whether these stories were true, and to proceed to correct and reform as might seem good to him. The regular clergy were exempt from episcopal visitation, except under especial directions from Rome. The occasion had appeared so serious as to make extraordinary interference necessary.

On the receipt of the Papal commission, Cardinal Morton, among other letters, wrote the following letter:--

John, by Divine permission, Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all
England, Legate of the Apostolic See, to William, Abbot of the
Monastery of St. Albans, greeting.

We have received certain letters under lead, the copies whereof we
herewith send you, from our most holy Lord and Father in Christ,
Innocent, by Divine Providence Pope, the eighth of that name. We
therefore, John, the Archbishop, the visitor, reformer, inquisitor,
and judge therein mentioned, in reverence for the Apostolic See,
have taken upon ourselves the burden of enforcing the said
commission; and have determined that we will proceed by, and
according to, the full force, tenor, and effect of the same.

And it has come to our ears, being at once publicly notorious and
brought before us upon the testimony of many witnesses worthy of
credit, that you, the abbot afore-mentioned, have been of long time
noted and diffamed, and do yet continue so noted, of simony, of
usury, of dilapidation and waste of the goods, revenues, and
possessions of the said monastery, and of certain other enormous
crimes and excesses hereafter written. In the rule, custody, and
administration of the goods, spiritual and temporal, of the said
monastery, you are so remiss, so negligent, so prodigal, that
whereas the said monastery was of old times founded and endowed by
the pious devotion of illustrious princes, of famous memory,
heretofore kings of this land, the most noble progenitors of our
most serene Lord and King that now is, in order that true religion
might flourish there, that the name of the Most High, in whose
honour and glory it was instituted, might be duly celebrated there;

And whereas, in days heretofore, the regular observance of the said
rule was greatly regarded, and hospitality was diligently kept;

Nevertheless, for no little time, during which you have presided in
the same monastery, you and certain of your fellow-monks and
brethren (whose blood, it is feared, through your neglect, a severe
Judge will require at your hand) have relaxed the measure and form
of religious life; you have laid aside the pleasant yoke of
contemplation, and all regular observances--hospitality, alms, and
those other offices of piety which of old time were exercised and
ministered therein have decreased, and by your faults, your
carelessness, your neglect and deed, do daily decrease more and
more, and cease to be regarded--the pious vows of the founders are
defrauded of their just intent--the ancient rule of your order is
deserted; and not a few of your fellow-monks and brethren, as we
most deeply grieve to learn, giving themselves over to a reprobate
mind, laying aside the fear of God, do lead only a life of
lasciviousness--nay, as is horrible to relate, be not afraid to
defile the holy places, even the very churches of God, by infamous
intercourse with nuns, &c. &c.

You yourself, moreover, among other grave enormities and abominable
crimes whereof you are guilty, and for which you are noted and
diffamed, have, in the first place, admitted a certain married
woman, named Elena Germyn, who has separated herself without just
cause from her husband, and for some time past has lived in adultery
with another man, to be a nun or sister in the house or Priory of
Bray, lying, as you pretend, within your jurisdiction. You have next
appointed the same woman to be prioress of the said house,
notwithstanding that her said husband was living at the time, and is
still alive. And finally, Father Thomas Sudbury, one of your brother
monks, publicly, notoriously, and without interference or punishment
from you, has associated, and still associates, with this woman as
an adulterer with his harlot.

Moreover, divers other of your brethren and fellow-monks have
resorted, and do resort, continually to her and other women at the
same place, as to a public brothel or receiving house, and have
received no correction therefor.

Nor is Bray the only house into which you have introduced disorder.
At the nunnery of Sapwell, which you also contend to be under your
jurisdiction, you change the prioresses and superiors again and
again at your own will and caprice. Here, as well as at Bray, you
depose those who are good and religious; you promote to the highest
dignities the worthless and the vicious. The duties of the order are
cast aside; virtue is neglected; and by these means so much cost and
extravagance has been caused, that to provide means for your
indulgence you have introduced certain of your brethren to preside
in their houses under the name of guardians, when in fact they are
no guardians, but thieves and notorious villains; and with their
help you have caused and permitted the goods of the same priories to
be dispensed, or to speak more truly to be dissipated, in the
above-described corruptions and other enormous and accursed
offences. Those places once religious are rendered and reputed as it
were profane and impious; and by your own and your creatures'
conduct, are so impoverished as to be reduced to the verge of ruin.

In like manner, also, you have dealt with certain other cells of
monks, which you say are subject to you, even within the monastery
of the glorious proto-martyr Alban himself. You have dilapidated the
common property; you have made away with the jewels; the copses, the
woods, the underwood, almost all the oaks, and other forest trees,
to the value of eight thousand marks and more, you have made to be
cut down without distinction, and they have by you been sold and
alienated. The brethren of the abbey, some of whom, as is reported,
are given over to all the evil things of the world, neglect the
service of God altogether. They live with harlots and mistresses
publicly and continuously, within the precincts of the monastery and
without. Some of them, who are covetous of honour and promotion, and
desirous therefore of pleasing your cupidity, have stolen and made
away with the chalices and other jewels of the church. They have
even sacrilegiously extracted the precious stones from the very
shrine of St. Alban; and you have not punished these men, but have
rather knowingly supported and maintained them. If any of your
brethren be living justly and religiously, if any be wise and
virtuous, these you straightway depress and hold in hatred.... You
...

But we need not transcribe further this overwhelming document. It pursues its way through mire and filth to its most lame and impotent conclusion. After all this, the abbot was not deposed; he was invited merely to reconsider his doings, and, if possible, amend them. Such was Church discipline, even under an extraordinary commission from Rome. But the most incorrigible Anglican will scarcely question the truth of a picture drawn by such a hand; and it must be added that this one unexceptionable indictment lends at once assured credibility to the reports which were presented fifty years later, on the general visitation. There is no longer room for the presumptive objection that charges so revolting could not be true. We see that in their worst form they could be true, and the evidence of Legh and Leghton, of Rice and Bedyll, as it remains in their letters to Cromwell, must be shaken in detail, or else it must be accepted as correct. We cannot dream that Archbishop Morton was mistaken, or was misled by false information. St. Albans was no obscure priory in a remote and thinly-peopled county. The Abbot of St. Albans was a peer of the realm, taking precedence of bishops, living in the full glare of notoriety, within a few miles of London. The archbishop had ample means of ascertaining the truth; and, we may be sure, had taken care to examine his ground before he left on record so tremendous an accusation. This story is true--as true as it is piteous. We will pause a moment over it before we pass from this, once more to ask our passionate Church friends whether still they will persist that the abbeys were no worse under the Tudors than they had been in their origin, under the Saxons, or under the first Norman and Plantagenet kings. We refuse to believe it. The abbeys which towered in the midst of the English towns, the houses 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 enquiry, depositions of monks in official examinations, and other similar papers, which, in many instances, are too offensive to be produced, and may rest in obscurity, unless contentious persons compel us to bring them forward. Some of these, however, throw curious light on the habits of the time, and on the collateral disorders which accompanied the more gross enormities. They show us, too, that although the dark tints predominate, the picture was not wholly black; that as just Lot was in the midst of Sodom, yet was unable by his single presence to save the guilty city from destruction, so in the latest era of monasticism there were types yet lingering of an older and fairer age, who, nevertheless, were not delivered, like the patriarch, but perished most of them with the institution to which they belonged. The hideous exposure is not untinted with fairer lines; and we see traits here and there of true devotion, mistaken but heroic.

Of these documents two specimens shall be given in this place, one of either kind; and both, so far as we know, new to modern history. The first is so singular, that we print it as it is found--a genuine antique, fished up, in perfect preservation, out of the wreck of the old world.

About eight miles from Ludlow, in the county of Herefordshire, once stood the abbey of Wigmore. There was Wigmore Castle, a stronghold of the Welsh Marches, now, we believe, a modern, well-conditioned mansion; and Wigmore Abbey, of which we do not hear that there are any remaining traces. Though now vanished, however, like so many of its kind, the house was three hundred years ago in vigorous existence; and when the stir commenced for an enquiry, the proceedings of the abbot of this place gave occasion to a memorial which stands in the Rolls collection as follows:--[R]

Articles to be objected against John Smart, Abbot of the Monastery
of Wigmore, in the county of Hereford, to be exhibited to the Right
Honourable Lord Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal and Vice-gerent
to the King's Majesty.

1. The said abbot is to be accused of simony, as well for taking
money for advocation and putations of benefices, as for giving of
orders, or more truly, selling them, and that to such persons which
have been rejected elsewhere, and of little learning and light
consideration.

2. The said abbot hath promoted to orders many scholars when all
other bishops did refrain to give such orders on account of certain
ordinances devised by the King's Majesty and his Council for the
common weal of this realm. Then resorted to the said abbot scholars
out of all parts, whom he would promote to orders by sixty at a
time, and sometimes more, and otherwhiles less. And sometimes the
said abbot would give orders by night within his chamber, and
otherwise in the church early in the morning, and now and then at a
chapel out of the abbey. So that there be many unlearned and light
priests made by the said abbot, and in the diocese of Llandaff, and
in the places afore named--a thousand, as it is esteemed, by the
space of this seven years he hath made priests, and received not so
little money of them as a thousand pounds for their orders.

3. Item, that the said abbot now of late, when he could not be
suffered to give general orders, for the most part doth give orders
by pretence of dispensation; and by that colour he promoteth them to
orders by two and three, and takes much money of them, both for
their orders and for to purchase their dispensations after the time
he hath promoted them to their orders.

4. Item, the said abbot hath hurt and dismayed his tenants by
putting them from their leases, and by enclosing their commons from
them, and selling and utter wasting of the woods that were wont to
relieve and succour them.

5. Item, the said abbot hath sold corradyes, to the damage of the
said monastery.

6. Item, the said abbot hath alienate and sold the jewels and plate
of the monastery, to the value of five hundred marks, _to purchase
of the Bishop of Rome his bulls to be a bishop, and to annex the
said abbey to his bishopric, to that intent that he should not for
his misdeeds be punished, or deprived from his said abbey_.

7. Item, that the said abbot, long after that other bishops had
renounced the Bishop of Rome, and professed them to the King's
Majesty, did use, but more verily usurped, the office of a bishop by
virtue of his first bulls purchased from Rome, till now of late, as
it will appear by the date of his confirmation, if he have any.

8. Item, that he the said abbot hath lived viciously, and kept to
concubines divers and many women that is openly known.

9. Item, that the said abbot doth yet continue his vicious living,
as it is known, openly.

10. Item, that the said abbot hath spent and wasted much of the
goods of the said monastery upon the foresaid women.

11. Item, that the said abbot is malicious and very wrathful, not
regarding what he saith or doeth in his fury or anger.

12. Item, that one Richard Gyles bought of the abbot and convent of
Wigmore a corradye, and a chamber for him and his wife for term of
their lives; and when the said Richard Gyles was aged and was very
weak, he disposed his goods, and made executors to execute his will.
And when the said abbot now being ---- perceived that the said
Richard Gyles was rich, and had not bequested so much of his goods
to him as he would have had, the said abbot then came to the chamber
of the said Richard Gyles, and put out thence all his friends and
kinsfolk that kept him in his sickness; and then the said abbot set
his brother and other of his servants to keep the sick man; and the
night next coming after the said Richard Gyles's coffer was broken,
and thence taken all that was in the same, to the value of forty
marks; and long after the said abbot confessed, before the executors
of the said Richard Gyles, that it was his deed.

13. Item, that the said abbot, after he had taken away the goods of
the said Richard Gyles, used daily to reprove and check the said
Richard Gyles, and inquire of him where was more of his coin and
money; and at the last the said abbot thought he lived too long, and
made the sick man, after much sorry keeping, to be taken from his
feather-bed, and laid upon a cold mattress, and kept his friends
from him to his death.

15. Item, that the said abbot consented to the death and murdering
of one John Tichkill, that was slain at his procuring, at the said
monastery, by Sir Richard Cubley, canon and chaplain to the said
abbot; which canon is and ever hath been since that time chief of
the said abbot's council; and is supported to carry crossbowes, and
to go whither he lusteth at any time, to fishing and hunting in the
king's forests, parks, and chases; but little or nothing serving the
quire, as other brethren do, neither corrected of the abbot for any
trespass he doth commit.

16. Item, that the said abbot hath been perjured oft, as is to be
proved and is proved; and as it is supposed, did not make a true
inventory of the goods, chattels, and jewels of his monastery to the
King's Majesty and his Council.

17. Item, that the said abbot hath infringed all the king's
injunctions which were given him by Doctor Cave to observe and keep;
and when he was denounced _in pleno capitulo_ to have broken the
same, he would have put in prison the brother as did denounce him to
have broken the same injunctions, save that he was let by the
convent there.

18. Item, that the said abbot hath openly preached against the
doctrine of Christ, saying he ought not to love his enemy, but as he
loves the devil; and that he should love his enemy's soul, but not
his body.

19. Item, that the said abbot hath taken but small regard to the
good-living of his household.

20. Item, that the said abbot hath had and hath yet a special favour
to misdoers and manquellers, thieves, deceivers of their neighbours,
and by them [is] most ruled and counselled.

21. Item, that the said abbot hath granted leases of farms and
advocations first to one man, and took his fine, and also hath
granted the same lease to another man for more money; and then would
make to the last taker a lease or writing, with an antedate of the
first lease, which hath bred great dissension among gentlemen--as
Master Blunt and Master Moysey, and other takers of such leases--and
that often.

22. Item, the said abbot having the contrepaynes of leases in his
keeping, hath, for money, rased out the number of years mentioned in
the said leases, and writ a fresh number in the former taker's
lease, and in the contrepayne thereof, to the intent to defraud the
taker or buyer of the residue of such leases, of whom he hath
received the money.

23. Item, the said abbot hath not, according to the foundation of
his monastery, admitted freely tenants into certain alms-houses
belonging to the said monastery; but of them he hath taken large
fines, and some of them he hath put away that would not give him
fines: whither poor, aged, and impotent people were wont to be
freely admitted, and [to] receive the founder's alms that of the old
customs [were] limited to the same--which alms is also diminished by
the said abbot.

24. Item, that the said abbot did not deliver the bulls of his
bishopric, that he purchased from Rome, to our sovereign lord the
king's council till long after the time he had delivered and
exhibited the bulls of his monastery to them.

25. Item, that the said abbot hath detained and yet doth detain
servants' wages; and often when the said servants hath asked their
wages, the said abbot hath put them into the stocks, and beat them.