eucharist, and penance, are not the source and constant life.

III.

How all that came to an end, and when, will be told in my next tract (No. III.). Once established it might have been thought it would remain to the end of the world, a standing testimony that the "new heavens and the new earth in which justice dwelt," as foretold by prophecy, had come. While the picture is before him, let me ask the reader to put the following question to himself: "What has England, 'reformed' England, now in the place of the Religious Orders, doing those works of charity and mercy which they did?" "They are gone, and their place knoweth them no more." The Church of God, their mother, made the Religious Orders, in a special way, the administrators of her alms to the poor, the lame, the blind, the helpless, the widow and orphan, and the houseless. But both her alms, and her children who were to enjoy the benefit of them, are gone, and herself is a powerless spectator of their desolation.

On another ground have the Religious Orders established their right and title to the gratitude of England, nor of England more than to the world at large. But for them we should never have seen or known the great works of Greek and Roman genius, which

have for twelve hundred years been the delight of the scholar, the poet, the philosopher, the orator, the painter, the sculptor, and the historian. Considering the rage there was at divers periods, since the Roman Empire in the West fell, and the Mahommedan in the East rose, to destroy every vestige of the literary as well as the sacred remains of preChristian antiquity, it is inconceivable how they did not perish in the general devastation. The historian Burnett, not able to account for the fact, invented a hypothesis that he thought would do So. It was, that the monks were the inventors, and not the mere copiest and editors of the works ascribed to Homer, Virgil, and all the other Greek and Roman authors. To prove the monks knaves -for, of course, they forged the books for gain-he was ready to give them an imperial distinction in the world of letters, thereby showing his estimate of works of the highest genius. The greatness of the absurdity of his solution of the difficulty, so far as it is worth citing, goes the more to prove the magnitude of the task of copying with the pennot the writings of an author or two, but the literature of two great nations, and distributing it for the enlightenment of mankind over the globe.

It was a task which none but a great order like the Benedictines could have done. And as gratefully as readily will it be admitted by all that, without exaggeration, the greatest and most precious legacy

C

that the old heathen world could, at its death, make to the new, was its literary productions. To the incalculable advantage of all nations and all times to the end of the world, it made it; but nolens volens, it could only make it sure to its heirs, by appointing a great religious educational order, in Christ's kingdom, to be the trustees and executors of its will.

It has never been said that the labours bestowed upon human or profane learning, arts and sciences, by the Religious Orders, interfered in any way with the primary dedication they had made of themselves to sacred studies and to the duties of the priesthood in the sanctuary or in the choir. The greatest masters among them of human learning, have been distinguished above their brethren by eminence of piety and spiritual attainments. And, as a rule, it has been especially in them that humility, the indispensable associate of every other virtue, has always shone most conspicuously. "Seeking first the kingdom of God and His justice," seeking it for God's sake, for their own souls' sake, and for their neighbours' sake, in all their motives as well as their works, from morn to night, their application of a portion of their day to secular studies and instruction no more drew their hearts from religion or from God, than manual labour in the field or taking their meals and recreation did.

Great as their labours were in the cause of litera

ture, in giving it a channel by which the rivers of Greek and Roman learning might be made to water the whole earth, side by side with the Catholic faith, the churches and cathedrals still standing, which they raised to Almighty God for the celebration of His service, will not allow us to believe that religion was not regarded by them all the while as infinitely above all other things. The first stone building we hear of was the monastery erected by St. Bennet Biscop (about the year 670-80) at Jarrow. Out of that act sprung up stone architecture apace through out the whole of England and Scotland. From the repeated acts of devastation and sacrilege committed by the Danes in the ninth century, which history has recorded, we are enabled to form a judgment of the progress of sacred architecture during the two next centuries. It was on the monasteries and the convents with the churches attached to them that these barbarous invaders vented their fiercest fury. With them it was not enough to massacre the inmates, and carry away everything belonging to them. Where they did not convert the buildings into fortresses for themselves, they levelled them with the ground. Even where they had been in many cases rebuilt during the tenth and eleventh centuries for the third time, the same fate again awaited many of them. From that period the temples that were dedicated to God, the great cathedrals and abbey churches, began to assume proportions that enabled

them to bid defiance to the ordinary means of destruction then available. It would be difficult to conceive any reason but one for the persistent and inextinguishable efforts made during the six hundred years which followed the foundation of the great abbey churches and monasteries at Jarrow and Weremouth till the fifteenth century. That one reason was, an overpowering devotion and an unquenchable desire on the part of the monks to rear palaces, as far as the hands of man could, worthy of God's presence and majesty. In giving that proof, they at the same time proclaimed to the world outside the Church what their faith was, and what the God they served must be.

There is something significant also in the architecture they adopted. Had an architect been asked to invent a style of building that would give the greatest amount of employment, that would occupy the greatest quantity of time, that would require the largest amount of skill and material; it would be the style they almost universally adopted, namely, the Gothic. It might seem that they sought to extract as much labour, consecrated labour, for as large a number of men as human ingenuity could devise; and this would apply also to the lands they had reclaimed. These were generally the roughest, the wildest, the most worthless, requiring a vast extent of toil and labour to bring them within the pale of cultivation and productiveness. Who would under