ENGLISH MONASTICISM one-third of all the land of the kingdom. This may be over-stated, but there can be no doubt that their estates were vastly too big. The monasteries were no longer needed as teachers of agriculture; and Christianity could not fare well under a system of religion that accumulated land as misers hoarded gold. Also, the common weal of national politics was threatened by the monks' ambitions and vested interests. William the Conqueror showed a great deal of political common sense when he prevented his nobles from forming large compact fiefs in England; and one regrets always that he did not reveal the same wisdom in his policy towards the monks. He would not have been wrong had he put a stern limit to the amount of land that a monastery could own or rent, for he would then have checked that passion for wealth and that lavish hospitality which turned the ruling thought of monks from unworldly goodness to practical and mundane ambition. The monasteries became free hotels, with a management so vast and so complex that hard men of business were needed, not men of prayer and self-sacrifice. Very difficult and dangerous was the problem which Henry VIII. inherited. A wiser man would have touched it with the greatest care, leaving his successors to attend to it little by little, in a piecemeal fashion; but Henry's need of money urged him on, and with the self-confidence of a despot, he unmade and made history at a terrific speed. The Church, the founder of the nation, was cut in two, and one of the halves has shown since then a peculiar brittleness, falling one by one into so many fragments that we have at the present time the separate charities of about there hundred modified Protestant creeds. If unity be strength, what can this want of union mean? If the Thames could be made to flow in three hundred diverging channels, what kind of boat could bring the East to the port of London? The river of faith should flow in one channel with the waters of many tributaries; then it is national, whether with mud banks or without them. However, the pre-Reformation times had one glorious harvest of a posthumous nature, an aftermath of greatness which the whole world has taken from England, while Englishmen themselves have failed to trace it home to its original cause and source. I refer to the Shakespearian drama, which owed its appeal and its support to that love of pageants and emotional display which the Catholic Church had fostered from the earliest times, and for which a strenuous dislike was entertained by all Puritans who grew up to manhood with Shakespeare. In the " Anatomy of Abuses," by Philip Stubbes, and in other writings of the sixteenth century, as in those by Gosson, we see how rapidly the wave of Puritanism gathered strength, till at last-only a few years after Shakespeare's death— it was powerful enough to submerge the drama. The greatest of all Englishmen lived at precisely the right time, when Puritanism was too young to rob him of a public. Had he appeared forty years later, his plays and their value in the nation's life |