Montesinos.—­Thus it is that men collectively as well as individually create for themselves so large a part of the evils they endure.

Sir Thomas More.—­Enforce upon your contemporaries that truth which is as important in politics as in ethics, and you will not have lived in vain!  Scatter that seed upon the waters, and doubt not of the harvest!  Vindicate always the system of nature, in other and sounder words, the ways of God, while you point out with all faithfulness

      “what ills
Remediable and yet unremedied
   Afflict man’s wretched race,”

and the approbation of your own heart will be sufficient reward on earth.

Montesinos.—­The will has not been wanting.

Sir Thomas More.—­There are cases in which the will carries with it the power; and this is of them.  No man was ever yet deeply convinced of any momentous truth without feeling in himself the power as well as the desire of communicating it.

Montesinos.—­True, Sir Thomas; but the perilous abuse of that feeling by enthusiasts and fanatics leads to an error in the opposite extreme.

We sacrifice too much to prudence; and, in fear of incurring the danger or the reproach of enthusiasm, too often we stifle the holiest impulses of the understanding and the heart.

“Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.”

- But I pray you, resume your discourse.  The monasteries were probably the chief palliatives of this great evil while they existed.

Sir Thomas More.—­Their power of palliating it was not great, for the expenditure of those establishments kept a just pace with their revenues.  They accumulated no treasures, and never were any incomes more beneficially employed.  The great abbeys vied with each other in architectural magnificence, in this more especially, but likewise in every branch of liberal expenditure, giving employment to great numbers, which was better than giving unearned food.  They provided, as it became them, for the old and helpless also.  That they prevented the necessity of raising rates for the poor by the copious alms which they distributed, and by indiscriminately feeding the indigent, has been inferred, because those rates became necessary immediately after the suppression of the religious houses.  But this is one of those hasty inferences which have no other foundation than a mere coincidence of time in the supposed cause and effect.

Montesinos.—­For which you have furnished a proverbial illustration in your excellent story of Tenterden Steeple and Goodwin Sands.