Montesinos.—The will has not been wanting.
Sir Thomas More.—There are cases in which the will carries with it the power; and this is of them. No man was ever yet deeply convinced of any momentous truth without feeling in himself the power as well as the desire of communicating it.
Montesinos.—True, Sir Thomas; but the perilous abuse of that feeling by enthusiasts and fanatics leads to an error in the opposite extreme.
We sacrifice too much to prudence; and, in fear of incurring the danger or the reproach of enthusiasm, too often we stifle the holiest impulses of the understanding and the heart.
“Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.”
—But I pray you, resume your discourse. The monasteries were probably the chief palliatives of this great evil while they existed.
Sir Thomas More.—Their power of palliating it was not great, for the expenditure of those establishments kept a just pace with their revenues. They accumulated no treasures, and never were any incomes more beneficially employed. The great abbeys vied with each other in architectural magnificence, in this more especially, but likewise in every branch of liberal expenditure, giving employment to great numbers, which was better than giving unearned food. They provided, as it became them, for the old and helpless also. That they prevented the necessity of raising rates for the poor by the copious alms which they distributed, and by indiscriminately feeding the indigent, has been inferred, because those rates became necessary immediately after the suppression of the religious houses. But this is one of those hasty inferences which have no other foundation than a mere coincidence of time in the supposed cause and effect.
Montesinos.—For which you have furnished a proverbial illustration in your excellent story of Tenterden Steeple and Goodwin Sands.
Sir Thomas More.—That illustration would have been buried in the dust if it had not been repeated by Hugh Latimer at St. Paul’s Cross. It was the only thing in my writings by which he profited. If he had learnt more from them he might have died in his bed, with less satisfaction to himself and less honour from posterity. We went different ways, but we came to the same end, and met where we had little expectation of meeting. I must do him the justice to say that when he forwarded the work of destruction it was with the hope and intention of employing the materials in a better edifice; and that no man opposed the sacrilegious temper of the age more bravely. The monasteries, in the dissolution of which he rejoiced as much as he regretted the infamous disposal of their spoils, delayed the growth of pauperism, by the corrodies with which they were charged; the effect of these reservations on the part of the founders and benefactors being, that a comfortable and respectable support was provided for those who grew old in the service of their respective families; and there existed no great family, and perhaps no wealthy one, which had not entitled itself thus to dispose of some of its aged dependants. And the extent of the depopulating system was limited while those houses endured: because though some of the great abbots were not less rapacious than the lay lords, and more criminal, the heads in general could not be led, like the nobles, into a prodigal expenditure, the burthen of which fell always upon the tenants; and rents in kind were to them more convenient than in money, their whole economy being founded upon that system, and adapted to it.
Montesinos.—Both facts and arguments were indeed strongly on your side when you wrote against the supplication of beggars; but the form in which you embodied them gave the adversary an advantage, for it was connected with one of the greatest abuses and absurdities of the Romish Church.