* * * * * * *
Three centuries after the time we have been considering, the
religious houses were suppressed--to use that euphonious term which
has become universally accepted--only after they had existed in these
islands in one form or another for at least a thousand years. Century
after century monasteries continued to spring up, and there never was
much difficulty in finding devout people who were ready to befriend a
new order, to endow it with lands, and to give it a fair start. In
other words, there was always a _demand_ for new monasteries,
and the first sure sign that that demand had been met, and more than
met, was when the supply of monks began to fall short, and when, as
was the case before the end of the fifteenth century, the religious
houses could not fill up their full complement of brethren. Is it
conceivable that this constant demand could have gone on, unless the
common sense of the nation had been profoundly convinced, and
continuously convinced, that the religious orders gave back some
great equivalent for all the immense surrenders of wealth which
generation after generation of Englishmen had made--some equivalent
for all the vast stream of benefactions which flowed on from age to
age so strongly that kings and statesmen had to interfere and check,
if it might be, the dangerous prodigality of lavish benefactors? What
that equivalent was, what the real work of the monasteries was, what
great functions they discharged in the body politic, what the nation
at large gained by their continuance and lost by their fall--these
are questions which on this occasion I am not concerned with, and
with which I scrupulously forbear from dealing.
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