monasteries, without so much as advancing one single step towards justifying the measures which were actually directed against them. For, first: Ecclesiastical reforms do not properly come within the province of kings and parliaments. We cheerfully render to Cæsar his own, but we claim of him in return not to meddle with the things of God. Secondly: No extent of corruption in the bodies could have warranted the means actually taken to cure it. We must not do evil that good may come. Thirdly: The utmost stretch of charity will not allow the hope that Henry was actuated in his proceedings by any honest desire of correcting abuses. But we are spared from the necessity of concessions, even for argument's sake, which the enemies of the Catholic Faith themselves do not demand of us.

And yet it is perhaps impossible to look into the records of the particular monastery which has led to these remarks, St. Augustine's at Canterbury, without finding reason to suspect the absence, as time went on, of that high and heavenly temper to which such bodies are designed to bear witness, and to which, with whatever drawbacks of earth, 'their witness has been on the whole so full and conspicuous. Fierce contests for prerogative, jealous resistance of encroachments, the sort of esprit de corps, which, without the greatest watchfulness, even religious bodies are in continual danger of substituting for any higher bond of union, and motive to zeal, with all its attendant liabilities to haughtiness, ambition, and uncharitableness— such, judging from Thorn's annals of his own monastery, would seem to have been the temptation to which these societies were peculiarly liable from the time when the riches of the world began to flow into their treasury. One cannot but fear, for instance, that the feelings with which the monks of St. Augustine's, in Thorn's day at

least, regarded their brethren of Christ-church, was rather that which we may conceive some powerful college harbouring towards its rival in the same university, than that of one member of Christ's body towards one of its fellow members. There is ever a risk lest minor

spheres of attachment should become ultimate centres of those affections which they are providentially intended not to absorb, but to elicit. Such is the peril against which, so far as we can form an opinion, the brethren of St. Augustine's seem to have been exposed. We have already had occasion to notice the harsh and even bitter terms in which Thorn speaks of Archbishop Lanfranc. It must also be mentioned, with sorrow, that in one place the same chronicler seems to give in, almost exultingly, to current stories against the brethren of Christchurch, as though his own monastery could gain credit by its sister's disgrace. And yet all reports seem to agree in giving Christ-church a high character among the religious establishments of England. To go to a different point, there is certainly something unsatisfactory in the accounts of those sumptuous entertainments which monastic bodies were in the practice of giving, under the plea, and no doubt in the spirit, of hospitality, to the great men of the time. The enthronization of an archbishop was a more legitimate occasion of such splendid festivities than seems always to have existed; yet one cannot but feel that St. Augustine and his monks would have been somewhat startled by the bills of fare in which later abbots appear to have seen nothing but the natural result of a compliance with St. Paul's injunction to hospitality. Several of these documents will be found in Mr. Somner's History of Canterbury; and they indicate, no doubt, a conception of hospitality, which none can deny to be magnificent, but which be

longs rather to this world than to the angelic life of the cloister. No common man must he have been who, after one of these sumptuous banquets, could settle down at once to his pallet of straw, or his simple meal of fish and eggs; or who, while the prospect of such excitements was imminent, or their memory fresh, could pursue his meditations with the requisite freedom from disturbance. It is pleasant, however, to turn from these occasional, and, as we may suppose, rare infringements of the usual simplicity of monastic life, to the description of its ordinary routine, as practised in England according to the Benedictine rule. Thus we read, for instance, that "Every monk had his own cell to himself; a place of repose, where he might sleep undisturbed, or give himself freely to prayer and spiritual exercises, without any kind of molestation from any of the rest of the brethren.... They had a mat and a hard pillow to lie down upon, and a blanket or rug to keep them warm. They slept in their clothes, girt with girdles, and thereby were always ready to attend their night devotions at the canonical hours. In the dormitory a perpetual silence was enjoined." However, that, despite these goodly provisions, the spirit of Dunstan, Anselm, and Becket was no longer alive in the monasteries of England, at least in the sixteenth century, is but too apparent from the history of their dissolution. Among the heart-sickening details of that monstrous sacrilege, there is nothing sadder to contemplate than the criminal facility with which, almost without exception, the monastic bodies suffered themselves to be threatened, or bribed, into the surrender of an heritage, compared with which, their lives or their liberties should have seemed but as dust in the balance. Thus, every officer of St. Augustine's, from the abbot

downwards, put his hand to a paper, by which the goods of the house, including all the sacred vessels and ornaments of the church, were made over unreservedly and unconditionally into the king's hands. The reader who desires further satisfaction on this painful subject will find in Dugdale two inventories; one, of the church-plate and ornaments, the other, of the vestments, all of which were forthwith transferred into the king's treasury. The vestments were pronounced "unfit for his Majesty's use;" not so, alas! the church-plate. And thus, the " monstrances" and chalices from which the highest Mysteries had been for ages presented to adoring eyes, or dispensed to faithful souls, were snatched from the very altars by profane hands, to promote the purposes of avarice, if not even to serve the uses of luxury. Among the valuables which are comprised in these catalogues, were gilt statues of St. Augustine and St. Ethelbert.

St. Augustine's monastery soon fell into ruins, and the ground on which it stood was let out to the highest bidder. Even in days of which reverence for sacred things and places was so characteristic as those of Charles I. the profanation of this hallowed spot seems to have attracted no public notice; much less, of course, in the ages following. In what way the ground and buildings which still remain upon it (all of them, it is believed, of comparatively modern date) are now portioned out, and for what purposes they are employed, the reader is probably aware, or may at least easily inform himself. There is no need to put the melancholy fact on record; more especially since the days seem happily coming round, when the voice of Catholic England will cry out, not merely for the protection of such holy enclosures from abuse, but for their restoration to the objects for which they were anciently set apart. But it is time to resume the thread of our narrative.

CHAPTER XIV.

MISSION OF ST. MELLITUS AND HIS COMPANIONS.

THE chronology of the epoch to which these pages relate is not a little perplexed; but the following arrangement of events according to dates, which is taken from Alford, will perhaps, be found sufficiently exact for the purposes of the present sketch. St. Augustine and

his brethren arrived in England in the spring of 596, in the midst of the Paschal Alleluias. King Ethelbert and others were admitted into the Church by baptism at Pentecost of the same year; soon after which St. Augustine repaired to Arles for consecration, which he received on November 17. He returned to England in 598, at the Christmas of which year, or rather early in the January of 599, took place the baptism of the 10,000 converts, mentioned in St. Gregory's letter to Eulogius. In the same year, 599, St. Augustine dispatched messengers to Rome, the very messengers, probably, from whom St. Gregory derived his information on the prosperous state of the English mission. These

1

2

1 Vid. p. 111. This letter was written in the summer of 599, and speaks of the baptism of the 10,000 converts, as having taken place at Christmas of the current (first) year of the Indiction, which began in September 598.

2 St. Bede, however, says that the messengers were sent immediately (continuò) on St. Augustine's return from Arles; but this,

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