service for the propter hoc. We feel ourselves unsafe in the hands of this great discoverer of judgments, who, with the other writers who have followed in his wake, seems to have quite forgotten the words of our Lord about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices, or about those eighteen upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell and slew them.

To some men the task of interpreting God's judgments is a very congenial one, and they revel in the accumulated evidence which is supposed to prove these judgments beyond doubt. I ask, however, for a more dispassionate consideration of the subject of Church and monastic lands.

Monasteries had a long history before the reign of Henry VIII. When the Christian Church had convinced itself that the monastic life was the highest type of religion people readily gave lands and tithes and privileges to these institutions, thinking that thereby they were doing God service. Kings and nobles founded monasteries and nunneries, and provided for their continuance for ever by bestowing upon them a goodly heritage of lands. In course of time it came to be thought by the bishops in England that they could best serve religion by consenting to the greater parochial tithes being assigned to some monastic or collegiate church, and leaving the vicar of the parish to subsist upon the smaller tithes as the deputy and representative of the distant monastery. In consequence of this policy persistently carried out for centuries the parishes were impoverished and the monasteries grew great and wealthy. There is in English Church history a long and pitiful story of the arrogance of the regular clergy in the monasteries in their dealings with the secular parish priests.

A halo of religious romance long gathered round the heads of the abbots and monks, in contrast with which the life of the parish priest was prosaic and humble. In their very best days the monasteries grasped at all the possessions and power which they could obtain, and at the beginning of the sixteenth century they are said

to have possessed nearly one-fifth of the land of England.

Into the causes which led to the suppression of the monasteries we do not now inquire. For good reasons or bad ones, and these are strangely intermingled in the story of the suppression, the monasteries were suppressed and all their vast possessions taken from them.

The great upheaval in the sixteenth century was by no means the first time that monastic property was dealt with in England. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were many alien priories which were merely dependencies of foreign abbeys. They were ruled by the mother-houses abroad, which exacted from them large sums of money annually. Incompetence and discontent reigned in these priories. The bishops attempted reform to little purpose, and at last the priories were all handed over to the Crown in 1414 to be dealt with at the Royal pleasure.1

The endowments of Eton College and All Souls, Oxford came largely from the lands and properties of these priories.

Bishop Waynflete of Winchester in 1485, with the sanction of the Pope, suppressed Selborne Priory and appropriated the estates to Magdalen College, Oxford. About the same time Peterhouse and Jesus College at Cambridge received other monastic lands as endow

ments.

There was a precedent then for what was done in the reign of Henry VIII. Monastic lands were not so sacrosanct that they might not be used for other public purposes. When the great suppression of the sixteenth century came it was carried out ruthlessly, pitilessly, brutally. The Parliament gave everything into the hands of the King. A few bishoprics were founded out of the estates and some colleges assisted, but the main bulk of the vast property surrendered went into the hands of laymen. Neither Spelman nor his followers object

1 This, of course, was a consequence of the feudal system of land tenure whereby all estates were deemed as held from the Crown in return for national services.

to the founding of bishoprics, colleges and schools out of the monastic property, and their arguments are directed against the secularisation of lands devoted to the service of the Church. Before a just judgment can be spoken an inquiry must be held to ascertain how far those laymen and their descendants, who became possessors of monastic property, have exercised their stewardship in Church and State. And many of them, at all events, have nothing to fear from an investigation into their family history during the last three or four centuries.

I have felt it my duty to enter this protest against the conclusions of Spelman and others, and to point out that there is another side to their unlimited denunciations and to their unqualified assertions as to the fate and doom of so-called sacrilege.

APPENDIX C

HEAD OF THE CHURCH

THE death of King Edward VII and the accession of George V have given rise to the question of the position of the Kings of England in relation to the Church, and many have assumed that the title "Head of the Church" is appended to the Crown. I cannot explain the relation of the two without asking your attention to the principles which underlie the whole position. In Anglo-Saxon days the English Church was almost wholly independent of Rome. The first great appeal from it to the ruling Pope was carried by Wilfred of York, in A.D. 704, when Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, divided the Diocese of York and Wilfred appealed against_this. He returned home with the Papal bulls ordering Theodore's action to be disannulled, only to find that the Archbishop of Canterbury ignored them, and the King of Northumbria had them burnt and Wilfred himself committed to prison for nine months. So ended the first great appeal from the English Church to the Papal authority. With the Norman Conquest there came into England the first real continental influence. William the Conqueror had asked for the Papal blessing upon his invasion of England, but when he had won the country on the battlefield of Hastings he refused to acknowledge any authority over his crown. His answer to Gregory VII (Hildebrand) was "Hubert, your legate, Holy Father, coming to me in your behalf, bade me to do fealty to you and your successors, and to think better in the matter of the money which my predecessors were wont to send to the Roman Church. The one point I agreed to; the other I did not agree to.

I refused to do

fealty, nor will I, because neither have I promised it, nor do I find that my predecessors did it to your predecessors." He would pay the Peter's-pence, but would not acknowledge that he owed fealty or homage to any one for his crown.

During the next forty years the strong Norman Kings tyrannised over the English Church until they seemed to claim both spiritual and temporal jurisdiction. The long controversy was at last ended in 1107 by the acceptance of the conditions wrung from Henry I by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. These were, that no man in England should be invested with a bishopric by pastoral staff or ring at the hand of the King or any other layman, and Anselm promised that no one elected to a bishopric should be debarred from consecration by having done homage to the King. We must now ask what is meant by doing homage to the Throne. In these distant days the feudal laws prevailed in full force. Every nobleman and landowner held his property by royal grant, and in return was obliged to contribute into the King's hands for the national expenditure. There were no annual Parliamentary supplies, and there was no national Chancellor of the Exchequer. The bishops alone had no legal heirs to the episcopal estates, and therefore upon their death these temporalities lapsed to the Crown, and were granted again by the King to the new bishop, who, upon receiving them, was required to do homage, in which he acknowledged that he held his estates from the King himself. The regulation of the relation between the rights of the Crown of England and the claims of the Bishop of Rome was the subject of dispute for five hundred years, and records of this dispute are found in many Acts of Parliament designed to assert the national independence, and to curtail the constantly asserted jurisdiction of the Papacy. The crisis in the struggle did not come until the reign of Henry VIII, when in 1534 an Act was passed for abolishing all Papal authority, and restoring it to the Crown. This Act exempted nothing; its first sentence is, "Be it enacted by authority of this present Par

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