Thus a number of causes brought on the ruin of the monasteries.  Henry’s need of money; the refusal of the monks to sign the acts of supremacy and succession; the general drift of reform, and the iniquity of the monks.  They fell from natural causes and through the operation of laws which God alone controls.  As Hill neatly puts it, “Monasticism was healthy, active and vigorous; it became idle, listless and extravagant; it engendered its own corruption, and out of that corruption came death.”

Richard Bagot, a Catholic, in a recent article on the question, “Will England become Catholic?” which was published in the “Nuova Antologia,” says:  “Though it is impossible not to blame the so-called Reformers for the acts of sacrilege and barbarism through which they obtained the religious and political liberty so necessary to the intellectual and social progress of the race, it cannot be denied that no sooner had the power of the papacy come to an end in England than the English nation entered upon that free development which has at last brought it to its present position among the other nations of the world.”  Mr. Bagot also admits that “the political intrigues and insatiable ambition of the papacy during the succeeding centuries constituted a perpetual menace to England.”

The true view, therefore, is that two types of religious and political life, two epochs of human history, met in Henry’s reign.  The king and the pope were the exponents of conflicting ideals.  The fall of the monasteries was an incident in the struggle.  “The Catholics,” says Froude, “had chosen the alternative, either to crush the free thought which was bursting from the soil, or to be crushed by it; and the future of the world could not be sacrificed to preserve the exotic graces of medieval saints.”

The problem is reduced to this, Was the Reformation desirable?  Is Protestantism a curse or a blessing?  Would England and the world be better off under the sway of medieval religion than under the influence of modern Protestantism?  If monasticism were a fetter on human liberty and industry, if the monasteries were “so many seminaries of superstition and of folly,” there was but one thing to do—­to break the fetters and to destroy the monasteries.  To have succeeded in so radical a reform as that begun by King Henry, with forty thousand monks preaching treason, would have been an impossibility.  Henry cannot be blamed because the monks chose to entangle themselves with politics and to side with Rome as against the English nation.

Results of the Dissolution