Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 2.djvu/320

300 tabernacles for the divine spirit which they enshrined; and alike in village and city, the majestic houses of the Father of mankind and his especial servants towered up in sovereign beauty, symbols of the civil supremacy of the Church, and of the moral sublimity of life and character which had won the homage and the admiration of the Christian nations. Ever at the sacred gates sat Mercy, pouring out relief from a never-failing store to the poor and the suffering; ever within the sacred aisles the voices of holy men were pealing heavenwards, in intercession for the sins of mankind; and influences so blessed were thought to exhale around those mysterious precincts, that the outcasts of society—the debtor, the felon, and the outlaw—gathered round the walls, as the sick men sought the shadow of the apostle, and lay there sheltered from the avenging hand till their sins were washed from off their souls. Through the storms of war and conquest the abbeys of the middle ages floated, like the ark upon the waves of the flood, inviolate in the midst of violence, through the awful reverence which surrounded them.

The soul of 'religion,' however, had died out of it for many generations before the Reformation. At the close of the fourteenth century, Wyeliffe had cried that the rotting trunk cumbered the ground, and should be cut down. It had not been cut down; it had been allowed to stand for a hundred and fifty more years; and now it was indeed plain that it could remain no