if not in the offerings of Dathan and Abiram? Here were laymen and schismatics setting themselves up against the religious ceremonies, and priests of God, and making use, in their unauthorized and scandalous ministrations, of certain golden censers. Those who argue on your side of the question would certainly pronounce these polluted in the highest degree. But what was the case? Why, God himself pronounced them to be holy and ordered that the altar should be plated with the gold arising from them. Many excellent men have thought, that on the conversion of any heathen land, it is not only highly expedient to employ the revenues and possessions of the idol temples in the service and for the establishment of Christianity, but that it is sacrilege to put them to any other use. I am disposed to think that even this extreme view of the case is right: how much more were the religious houses-I mean taking even your view of their foundation and abuses-holy? But do not let us excuse the miserable selfishness of the present day, by imputing motives to our ancestors by which they were not influenced. Very few, comparatively speaking, of the abbeys were founded on a dying bed but if they had been, does not our own Church command Her ministers that they move their parishioners, then above all other times, to be charitable? It is a convenient excuse for us, when we look round at what our forefathers, out of their poverty did, and on what, out of our abundance, we do not do, to say that it is owing to our superior

light, and that wealth given out of the fear of purgatory is not given charitably. How unfair would it be, if when we see some benevolent man feeding and clothing the poor, we were to impute his benevolence to the hope that he had of pleasing his Maker, and thereby escaping future punishment! And as to what you say of the state of monasteries at the Reformation-we have learnt, over and over again, to make such assertions, till we really have taught ourselves to believe them. Look at the case as it was. A grasping tyrant sends out his minions to find or make all the charges they could against a certain set of men, whose wealth he was anxious to seize. They made the most diligent inquisition: they were urged on by every motive of rapacity and avarice; they were held back by no possible scruple, and I must say, that it has always appeared to me next to miraculous, that with all their pains, they could find so little matter of accusation, and so few instances of ill-regulated monasteries as there certainly were; and not more of dissolute conduct on the part of individuals of these probably many were fabricated, and all were more or less exaggerated. Look at the case by comparison: a hundred years after that time, the Puritan rebels issued commissions to enquire into the character and abilities of the parish clergy of England—a body, mark you, not so numerous as the monks in the time of Henry VIII., and against whom, therefore, in proportion, fewer complaints should have been brought forward. Now, I

think we are justified in putting the conscientiousness of Henry's and the Parliamentary Commissioners on much the same footing: both were as bad as they could be. Cromwell the first and Cromwell the second were much on a par, except that the latter was the bolder villain of the two. Now, it is notorious, that although the lives of the clergy in the time of Charles the Martyr were confessedly most pure, and their reputation as unsullied as it was possible for that of any body of men to be; many more and much grosser crimes were laid to their charge than had been to that of the religious houses in the previous century. What, in common fairness, can we draw from this, by way of inference? What, but that, far from being the abodes of vice as you say, the monasteries of the 16th century—and how much more of earlier ages—were as pure, as holy, and as well fulfilling the purposes of their institution, as it was possible that they should be? I do not mean to say that there were not great corruptions, both as to doctrine and discipline, in the then Church; but the former were not connected with the monasteries, and the latter only in the one fault-I acknowledge, a very great onee-of their being of extraepiscopal jurisdiction."

"There is a remarkable instance," observed Charles Abberley, who had listened attentively to Sir John," of the sanctity attaching itself to the very act of dedication-even though the purposes to which it is applied be actually wicked. Our Blessed

SAVIOUR Commended the widow who threw her two mites into the Treasury, notwithstanding the sinfulness of those in whose favour the treasury then was; notwithstanding that possibly that very money was a few days afterwards applied to rewarding Judas Iscariot for his betrayal."

"But sup

"Very true," said Sir John Morley. posing that all the tales against the monasteries were true, was that any reason for suppressing them? The Church, as a Church, was far more corrupted than the monasteries, as monasteries; what then? Was She to be annihilated, or reformed? Look at the foundations of our own day, which approach more nearly to religious houses than any other-I mean our Colleges. Who can deny, that the discipline and good order of these is fearfully degenerated? It is too true, that Fellowships, meant to make their possessors to labour uninterruptedly for the good of the Church, are too often seductive to sloth and selfindulgence; it is too true, that our Church's express injunctions have been permitted to fall into desuetude, that in many instances the Daily Service is so mutilated, as to be hardly the same-and that only in one, out of our thirty-eight colleges, is the weekly communion retained. Grievous scandals there have been and are in its ministration, when it is administered; and doubtless this and many other abuses call for visitation and reformation. But what a monstrous thing would it be--what exclamations of horror

would it create from one end of the kingdom to the other, if any reformer of the nineteenth century should propose to abolish them?"

"There is doubtless much in what you say," replied Col. Abberley, "and perhaps one is naturally prejudiced on the Protestant side of the question; but still I cannot but think that you must necessarily look on the Reformation—if you take this view of its effects—as a bad, instead of a good work."

"Well, my dear Sir, supposing such a consequence followed, which is by no means the case, very different views may and will be taken of the Reformation by those who are equally faithful sons of the Church of England. Have we not episcopal authority for observing, that to point out its errors, and lament its sacrileges, is not inconsistent with the truest devotion to our Holy Mother. Therefore, a consideration like that which you have just named would never alarm me. The truth of the matter, however, is, that the dissolution of the religious houses was but an accident in, not an essential part of, that movement which ended in the Reformation. You say that the Church has become implicated in the sin of sacrilege? When and how? She has always protested against it, sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly. Her best and wisest sons have, in their different ages, warned of its sin: even Latimer was opposed to it: Whitgift was its decided enemy; Andrewes refused a bishopric rather than