we should see what the world has often seen:  the disciples of the Nazarene dwelling in palaces, and vying with princes in the splendor of their retinues.  This is hardly the way to make real the teaching of “the kingdom not of this world.”  This world, in the meaning of that saying, is the old world of egotism, of self-assertion, of selfish rivalry, of the sense of separation.  The kingdom is that very realm of humane and universal consciousness added from above, the sense of the one soul common to all men and working through all men, whether they know it or not.

We can, therefore, see that the confiscation of the monasteries, and even the persecution of the religious orders, might be the cause of lasting spiritual good; it was like the opening of granaries and the scattering of grain abroad over the fields.  The religious force, instead of drawing men out of the world, thenceforth was compelled to work among all men, not creating beautiful abbeys but transforming common lives.  Persecution was the safeguard of sincerity, the fire of purification, from which men’s spirits came forth pure gold.  Among all nations of the world, Ireland has long held the first place for pure morals, especially in the relations of sex; and this is increasingly true of those provinces where the old indigenous element is most firmly established.  We may affirm that the spiritualizing of religious feeling through persecution has had its share in bringing this admirable result, working, as it did, on a race which has ever held a high ideal of purity.

Thus out of evil comes good; out of oppression, rapacity and confiscation grow pure unselfishness, an unworldly ideal, a sense of the invisible realm.  We shall presently see the same forces of rapacity and avarice sowing the seeds for a not less excellent harvest in the world of civil life.

The principle of feudalism, though introduced by the first Norman adventurers in the twelfth century, did not gain legal recognition over the whole country until the seventeenth.  The old communal tenure of the Brehon law was gradually superseded, so that, instead of innumerable tribal territories with elected chiefs, there grew up a system of estates, where the land was owned by one man and tilled by others.  The germ of this tenure was the right of private taxation over certain districts, granted by the Norman duke to his barons and warriors as the reward for their help in battle.  Feudal land tenure never was, and never pretended to be, a contract between cultivator and landowner for their mutual benefit.  It was rather the right to prey on the farmer, assigned to the landowner by the king, and paid for in past or present services to the king.  In other words, the head of the Norman army invited his officers to help themselves to a share of the cattle and crops over certain districts of England, and promised to aid them in securing their plunder, in case the Saxon cultivator was rash enough to resist.  The baronial order presently ceased to render any real service to their duke, beyond upholding him that he might uphold them.  But there was no such surcease for the Saxon cultivator.  The share of his cattle and crops which he was compelled to give up to the Norman baron became more rigidly defined, more strictly exacted, with every succeeding century, and the whole civil state of England was built up on this principle.