whose poverty was attached the stigma of crime; the division of class from class, the rich mounting up to place and power, the poor sinking to lower depths; destruction of custom as a check upon the exactions of landlords; the loss by the poor of those foundations at schools and universities intended for their children, and the passing away of ecclesiastical tithes into the hands of lay owners.[1]
It has become habitual with many persons to regard the greatness of the Elizabethan era as in some way rendered possible only by the dissolution of the monasteries. By this the national energies are vaguely supposed to have now first obtained a fair field and fair play. That society should have re-settled itself, and a new and great day should have dawned is nothing wonderful. The constitution of human society appears to be such as never to lose the power of re-creating itself on a new basis, however desperate the condition to which it may be for a time reduced. Out of revolution order once more will surely be evolved, however much may have been irretrievably lost in the cataclysm which suddenly arrested a natural and normal development. It is in no spirit of concession to a sentimental and sterile feeling of regret for a dead past that it is desired to bring home the fact that the dissolution of the monasteries did inflict a terrible blow on the social state and made life harder for the nation at large. It is always an advantage to know the truth and to learn how to face it. Besides, the past has ever its lesson for the present, and to know how grievous was the deception in the bright promises of national happiness and individual prosperity which the distribution of so noble a prize was to secure, may have its lessons even in our own day.
- ↑ Regrets are sometimes expressed that at least a distinction was not made between colleges of secular clergy, the hospitals, chantries and other eleemosynary foundations, and the religious houses properly so called. The distinction between these two classes of institutions seems to be clear to the minds of many persons in these days, but only because the real state of the case is misapprehended. In fact, all alike formed parts of one great system; the religious house was an eleemosynary foundation, and the hospital a house of prayer. It was impossible in practice, to those who had the actual working of this system before their eyes, to make the distinction sought to be instituted in later days. The voice of such a one as Latimer was as the voice of the solitary crying in the desert, and only serves to make it more clear how fatal and disastrous was the nature of the current which swept away all, and could sweep away no less than all, monasteries, hospitals, churches, colleges, chantries, into one common vortex of ruin.
