and desirous therefore of pleasing your cupidity, have stolen and made away with the chalices and other jewels of the church.  They have even sacrilegiously extracted the precious stones from the very shrine of St. Alban; and you have not punished these men, but have rather knowingly supported and maintained them.  If any of your brethren be living justly and religiously, if any be wise and virtuous, these you straightway depress and hold in hatred ...  You ...”

But we need not transcribe further this overwhelming document.  It pursues its way through mire and filth to its most lame and impotent conclusion.  After all this, the abbot was not deposed; he was invited merely to reconsider his doings, and if possible amend them.  Such was Church discipline, even under an extraordinary commission from Rome.  But the most incorrigible Anglican will scarcely question the truth of a picture drawn by such a hand; and it must be added that this one unexceptionable indictment lends at once assured credibility to the reports which were presented fifty years later, on the general visitation.  There is no longer room for the presumptive objection that charges so revolting could not be true.  We see that in their worst form they could be true, and the evidence of Legh and Leghton, of Rice and Bedyll, as it remains in their letters to Cromwell, must be shaken in detail, or else it must be accepted as correct.  We cannot dream that Archbishop Morton was mistaken, or was misled by false information.  St. Albans was no obscure priory in a remote and thinly-peopled county.  The Abbot of St. Albans was a peer of the realm, taking precedence of bishops, living in the full glare of notoriety, within a few miles of London.  The archbishop had ample means of ascertaining the truth; and, we may be sure, had taken care to examine his ground before he left on record so tremendous an accusation.  This story is true—­as true as it is piteous.  We will pause a moment over it before we pass from this, once more to ask our passionate Church friends whether still they will persist that the abbeys were no worse under the Tudors than they had been in their origin, under the Saxons, or under the first Norman and Plantagenet kings.  No, indeed, it was not so.  The abbeys which towered in the midst of the English towns, the houses clustered at their feet like subjects round some majestic queen, were images indeed of the civil supremacy which the Church of the Middle Ages had asserted for itself; but they were images also of an inner spiritual sublimity, which had won the homage of grateful and admiring nations.