As to the lack of interest in books, in education, in scholarship, even in the preservation of the great monuments of national literature after the change of religion in England, the easiest way to know it is to read Bishop Bale's account of what happened to the valuable books which had belonged to the old monastic and educational institutions at the Reformation. He approved of the suppression of the monasteries and was an ardent reformer, but he cannot help calling attention to the absolute neglect of the treasures of literature, not only on the part of the nobility and the common people, but on the part of the very universities themselves. It is easy to understand what an awful state of affairs there must have been to draw this indignant protest from so good a king's man and follower of the new order and protestant against everything Catholic. Bishop Bale said, in his preface to Leland's "New Year's Gift to Henry VIII," in 1549:
"Never had we been offended for the loss of our libraries, being so many in number and in so desolate places, for the more part, if the chief monuments and most notable works of our excellent writers had been preserved. If there had been in every shire of England but one solemn library for the preservation of those noble works and preferment of good learning in our posterity, it had been yet somewhat. But to destroy all without consideration, a great number of them which purchased those superstitions mansions reserved of those library books . . . some to scour their candlesticks, and some to rub their boots. Some they sold to the grocers and soap-sellers, and some over sea to the book-binders, not in small number, but at times whole ships full to the wondering of [{557}] the foreign nations. Yea, the universities of this realm are not all clear in this detestable fact. But cursed is . . .(he) which seeketh to be fed with such ungodly gains and so deeply shameth his natural country. I know a merchant man, which shall at this time be nameless, that bought the contents of two noble libraries for forty shillings' price, a shame it is to be spoken. This stuff hath he occupied in the stead of gray paper by the space of more than these ten years, and yet he hath store enough for as many years to come. I judge this to be true, and utter it with heaviness, that neither the Britains under the Romans and Saxons, nor yet the English people under the Danes and Normans, had ever such damage of their learned monuments as we have seen in our time."
It used to seem some condonation of these sad evils to say that the suppression of the monasteries was brought because of the evil lives of the monks. Protestant historians were wont to proclaim that they were plague-spots of immorality which had to be eradicated. The careful investigation of historians in our time has completely refuted any such conclusion as this. A few of the smaller monasteries were found not to be living up to their high ideals. A few, but a very few monks, were found to be unworthy of their calling. Even with all the desire that there was to discredit them, nothing could be found to say against the greater monasteries, and the governments had to employ other means in order to bring about their suppression with some shadow of legality. Creatures of the king were forced into the position of abbot and then by prearrangement surrendered the monasteries and their possessions to the crown. Every advance in critical history in modern times has tended more and more to the vindication of the monks.
An American in our own time might well be expected to hold the balance straight without disturbance from old-time prejudices. Rev. Dr. George Hedges, Dean of the Episcopal Theological School, of Cambridge, Mass., in his "Fountains Abbey: The Story of a Medieval Monastery," said (p. 88):
"The quiet judgment of the modern historian is in favor of the monks, and finds most of them to have been men of respectable and pious lives. The sober persons in white cassocks, who confessed faults in the chapter meeting and cheerfully suffered chastisement for them to which the man in the street gave not a moment's thought, had a passionate longing to be good. They were intent upon the living of a righteous life."
He says, further quoting from Burke, "An enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse."
EFFECT ON ART
It is generally recognized now that the religious revolt ruined art. Religion had supplied the motives for great art, but most of these, and especially the tender feeling of reverence for the Mother of God and of the saints and the belief in angels, disappeared at [{558}] this time or were sadly hampered in their expression, and the whole tendency of the reform movement was iconoclastic. Image worship was one of the bitterest imputations against the old Church. It is curiously interesting to note that just in as much as art has developed in Protestant countries again, the churches have been raised from bare conventicles and meeting-houses to shrines of artistic beauty once more. It must not be forgotten, however, that this is quite contrary to the "protests" that were originally made against the old Church and that the ideas involved in this rejection of art in the Church, helped to lead many in artistic uncultured minds away from Catholicity in that time of storm and stress.
In his chapter on Parish Life in England in his well-known book, "Before the Great Pillage," Rev. Augustus Jessop, who in spite of his bitter condemnation of what happened at and after the Reformation, has never, I believe, become a Catholic, tells of the marvellous beauty of the Church structures in the ages which used to be called dark and are now known to be full of light, and then tells what happened after the so-called Reformation.
"And we get fairly bewildered by the astonishing wealth of skill and artistic taste and aesthetic feeling which there must have been in this England of ours, in times which till lately we had assumed to be barbaric times. Bewildered, I say, because we cannot understand how it all came to a dead stop in a single generation, not knowing that the frightful spoliation of our churches and other parish buildings, and the outrageous plunder of the parish guilds in the reign of Edward the Sixth by the horrible band of robbers that carried on their detestable work, effected such a hideous obliteration, such a clean sweep of the precious treasures that were dispersed in rich profusion over the whole land, that a dull despair of ever replacing what had been ruthlessly pillaged crushed the spirit of the whole nation, and art died out in rural England, and King Whitewash and Queen Ugliness ruled supreme for centuries." (Italics ours.)