Page:Henry VIII and the English Monasteries.djvu/523

Rh 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.

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.