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tion, that he had paid a hundred and forty pounds to the abbot. The abbot sent for his accounts under the heads of his different offices under each head the convent was made out to be in debt. The abbot asking what was to be done, the officiarius said coolly that the treasury was empty, and he must borrow. It was too much. vestigations had revealed that the officiarius Secret inhad been speculating with the funds of the abbey "like a child of this world," filius hujus sæculi. He had been buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market,* and pocketing his gains. On his first entrance into the convent, while yet a lad, he had been a capitalist, and was found to have lent money on usury. As bursar he had cut down wood and sold it, and had made no entry of the payments. He had manumitted "villains," and the price of their freedom had gone to his private purse.

The abbot, in mente abhorrens, delivered his soul !

"What!" he exclaimed, "have you not confessed? Is not the whole convent ringing with it, that you have a hundred and sixty pounds? Have you not said that you have brought a hundred and forty pounds to me? Blush, brother, blush. This is the most audacious lie that you have yet told. Under what planet were you born? You know well you have brought me no money. You so swear and forswear and contradict yourself that there is no truth in you. as others have told me, that you will say anyIt is now plain, thing. You are not to be believed though you swear on book or sacrament. You have plundered us in your places of trust; we are in debt and cannot maintain our state. unfit are you then to hold office in the family How of the Lord! Where is the money for which you sold our woods? Where is the price of our villains' freedom?"

In Abbot Paul's time the punishment for such an officiarius would have been excommunication till full confession; after confession the hair-shirt, the scourge, the penitential vigil; years of disgrace and suffering; and absolution hardly earned at last. Times were changed. The new age had trampled out the old, and penance was out of fashion.

Abbot John was a good man in his way, but he was more anxious to recover his money

* Studuisti assidue bono pretio emere et caro pretio vendere. It is interesting to find a man charged as a crime with having acted on the cardinal maxim of the modern science of sciences. trade was understood before Adam Smith, but was The art of successful less highly appreciated.

than to punish sin. If he could wring out of
spoils, convent discipline might lie over till
the alarms of the officiarius a share of the
business might be useful to the abbey.
better times, and brother William's talents for

"Go now," he continued; "in recom-
pense for these transgressions bring the late
self gained by your unlawful tradings. The
abbot's hoard. Bring what you have your-
brother that conceals treasure departs from
God and becomes one of the family of the
Devil. Dives, for his avarice, had his reward
in hell. Lest you too go to the same place,
fetch the money. It must be a thousand
pounds in all. If you refuse, I will proceed
against you by the canons. Use no more vain
subterfuges. The good servant may live by
his office, but if he is a robber and a thief he
like Judas. Tell no more lies. Peccatores,
is fit only to be hanged, and to burst asunder
condescending to pun), who heap up riches
are they, brother, not precatores (the abbot
catores, are they not prædicatores, who justify
and deny the possession of them? Prævari-
themselves, and wash their hands in innocency
when they are really guilty? Bring the money,
I say; bring it, and you shall find me your
gracious lord. You may keep something in
honest fellow. You must not pile up gold for
your own purse, that you may live like an
yourself, and give nothing to your brethren.
I can allow you to do a stroke of business
now and then for yourself. Confine yourself
within the limits which I prescribe, and you
erty;* but do not plunge into the mire, or for
shall not be worried about your vow of prop-
a little gain risk being swallowed in the pit
forever."

officiarius withdrew to bethink himself. If
So ended the abbot's harangue, and the
he gave up the money, he confessed to per-
jury. If he held out, he might be prosecuted
him.
and the whole convent might turn against

He was a monk of resources.
the abbot, he said, would indeed be his gra-
went privately to the abbot's chaplain. If
He
cious lord, and would leave him in his offices,
he would pay all the outstanding debts of the
abbey. He would pay the sums which were
due to the Pope and king on the last elec-
tion; and he would undertake further that in
hundred pounds in the treasury, and should
three years his abbot should have three
owe nothing to any man.

Here was something like an official gen

* Et nullus contra te objiciet aut super vitio propri etatis improperabit in æternum-a faint pun again on the word property.

eral. What more could be desired? Gold flowing like the stream of Pactolus; and scandals smoothed over and buried.

The

Abbas gavisus non modice. The abbot was delighted. Brother William, who had been filius perditionis, was once more an heir of salvation. The chaplain was empowered to say that, on these terms, all should be forgotten. The officiarius "was as glad as one that had found great spoils." debts were paid; the abbey flourished, as well as the Roses wars would allow, so long as Abbot John lived; and when he died, we read without wonder that, after a short interval, this William of Wallingford, by consent of the whole house, reigned in his stead.

Little more remains to be said. We shall read without wonder also, that of all abbots of St. Alban's, this William of Wallingford contributed more towards the erection of that magnificent pile of buildings whose ruins breathe celestial music in the spirit of sentimental pietism.

It was the same William of Wallingford who made the Abbey of St. Alban's, while he ruled over it, a nest of sodomy and fornication-the very aisles of the church itself being defiled with the abominable orgies of incestuous monks and nuns.

The evidence of their infamy lies recorded with deadly conclusiveness. The cry of indignation against the condition of the exempt English abbeys reached to Rome, and shocked even the tolerant worldliness of the much-enduring Pope. When the civil war was over, and Henry the Seventh was settled on the throne, Innocent the Eighth enjoined Cardinal Morton to visit St. Alban's, and report upon it. Cardinal Morton, after examination of witnesses, has left in his Register * as the result of his inquiry, that the brethren of the abbey were living in filth and lasciviousness with the inmates of the dependent sisterhoods; that the adjoining Nunnery of Pray was a common brothel; the prioress setting the example, by living in unrebuked adultery with one of the monks. The abbot himself, too old for pleasures of the flesh, had reverted to his early habits; had cut down the

woods and sold them; had made away with the altar-vessels, and stolen and disposed of the jewels of the shrine. The few members of the house who retained a sense of decency were oppressed and persecuted, and the beautiful abbey, the home of the protomartyr, which had been born in miracles and cradled in asceticism, was given over to the abomination of desolation.

Another fifty years, and the religious houses in England, the soul of them long dead, the body putrefying and poisoning the air,were swept away by the besom of Henry the Eighth. The land could bear with them no longer. So abhorred were they, that in many places the country-people rose on them and, when the Government gave the word, tore them down, aisle and tower, groined arch and fluted column, down to the very ground, not leaving one stone upon another, and driving the plough over the spot where they stood. In the general ruin, the church of St. Alban's was saved by the burgesses. The long battle was over at last. The scene of so many struggles was endeared to them by the recollection of the fight. On the passing of the Act of Suppression, they purchased the buildings from the Crown for £400; and the church itself has been used since the Reformation for the Protestant service.

The ruins of the rest have stood, for three centuries, instructive emblems of the fate of noble institutions which survive the spirit which gave them meaning and utility. They preach with a silent force more eloquent than the tongues of a thousand orators, that the most saintly professions are not safe from the grossest corruption, and that the more ambitious the pretensions to piety, the more austere is the vengeance on the neglect of it.

There is a talk now of restoring St. Alban's. We are affecting penitence for the vandalism of our Puritan forefathers, and are anxious to atone for it.

Cursed is he that rebuildeth Jericho. Never were any institutions brought to a more deserved judgment than the monastic orders of England; and a deeper irreverence than the Puritan lies in the spurious devotionalism of an age which has lost its faith, and with its faith has lost the power to recognize

Cardinal Morton's letter to the abbot, detailing the visible workings of the ineffable Being by

the scandals which had been discovered, is printed in the third volume of Wilkin's Concilia.

whose breath we are allowed to exist.

SPEECH-MAKING IN CONGRESS.

ing feeling was like a dry, thirsting, August prairie, requiring only the fire of the orator to set it in a blaze. Such a season the orators fell upon, and they set the country in a glow from one end to the other, and they who did it must regard this as the brightest page of their histories. It is not probable that such an opportunity for the display of oratory. and patriotism will ever again occur in the lives of the present citizens of the republic.

ACCORDING to those who have heard | necessity of the time. Thus, the pervadClay and Webster, there was something in their eloquence which carried people away, and, according to the accounts of the biographers of Patrick Henry, there was something still more effective in his; and these statements are doubtless correct. The probability is, however, that the power was not altogether in their gift of speech, but also in having a receptive, impressionable people to listen to them. Naturally, there must have been that sympathetic relation between the listener and the speaker which enabled the one to work up the other to a white heat, as a blacksmith does his iron, to be made malleable and shaped according to his will.

Eight years of material prosperity has made a change. Public feeling is no longer a tinder to be set ablaze by the speech of orators. What would most strike the people, were Patrick Henry to speak to them to-day, would be the absence of those very marvelous effects in which they have been taught to believe from childhood up, for the bond of sym-

ing an audience would be broken. Henry's burning sentences would now be called gush, his elaborate rhetoric stilted. The country is no longer young and impressible, and patriotic exhortation has degenerated into the diffusive, ardent harangue of the stump. Everything that sounds like an appeal to conscience or patriotism is rejected as buncombe; for there is little of one or the other in public life, and such rejection is logical. Thus, however much our elders were electrified with the words of Henry Clay, the men of to-day could sit under them, cool and calm as a May morning.

This receptive, impressible character of the people arose from its being young; for nations, like individuals, have their youth, prime, and old age. The secret of the power which, according to the wri-pathy indispensable to the orator in movters of his time, Patrick Henry exercised, lies in his audience-a virgin people, living in a heroic age. Since then, with each succeeding generation, as the nation has grown older, the hold of the orator on the people has grown correspondingly weaker. During the war, before which the orator was gradually disappearing, there was something of a revival of eloquence, for misfortune and struggle impart the faculty of noble speech to the speaker and the power of song to the poet, and for a time men spoke as they had not done for a score of years. Among these, notably, was Lincoln, who on several occasions rose into biblical imagery and a charity that was heaven-born. A great moral idea was the key-note of his theme; the people were receptive, and they listened to him because they were under the stroke of adversity; for it is incontestable that they who suffer always listen to the teachings of virtue better than they who are happy. Others beside the President touched the hearts of those who asked for nothing better than to be soothed in their affliction and stimulated in their patriotic resolution. Men acquired stronger convictions and gave their lives freely to the country, and, as a consequence, things mundane fell correspondingly in value. Houses, land, food and raiment were no longer necessary; to save the country was the only recognized

The sneer at the old-fashioned orator has got into the school-houses and pervades journalism. It has taken the emotional feature of speech out of the young men who are coming forward to make laws and govern the country. There always has been a jealousy, latent or apparent, between the speaker and the writer. and the latter now takes his revenge and calls the former a blatant blatherskite-a vacuous vaporer; and here the orator is at a disadvantage, for his work spreads thin in comparison with that of the writer, who has the time to arrange his thoughts in compact form. The old-fashioned orator himself either recognizes the change. in public sentiment or the fire of his early manhood is burnt out by age, for he

no longer exhibits the heat and vociferation of his younger days. He is lost in the general level of conservatism, and has become, like the messenger of bad tidings to Macduff, niggard of his speech.

A gulf separates these conservatives, young and old, from those enthusiasts of war-time who, from the stump, the schoolhouse, and the church, hurried the people into the ranks, and joined with them in their march to the front, to the rude, wild air of "John Brown's body lies moldering in the grave, but his soul is marching on "-the Marseillaise of the American war. The air and the words of the song are ordinary, but the time gave it an extraordinary significance, and heroes, with riddled flags and stout hearts, sang it like men inspired as they marched to death or victory. The same men could now listen to it with very slight emotion-the remote and dying ripple of a mighty wave.

John J. Crittenden, who lingered behind Clay, Webster, Calhoun and Benton, on the Congressional stage as a member of the lower House, must have been struck with the change that had even then come over that body. Instead of the old legislative assembly to which he had been accustomed, where men hung on the eloquence of an orator of the old school, he found himself in the midst of a kind of legislative mob, where ten minutes' attention was rarely given to any man's speaking. It was like going from a quiet country village into the whirl and roar of Broadway. Every day there was the rush of business, the "fillibustering," and the crack of Thaddeus Stevens's whip with his "previous question." The old Kentuckian was so bewildered by this state of things that he remained a passive spectator in what took place about him-he was in it, but not of it. Under new rules and ways, he saw that it was impossible for him to take an active part, and he wisely refrained.

Although the bombast of the past was wearisome, it had its virtue in the patriotism by which it was usually inspired. This virtue gave it attraction, and there are few of our elders who have not been thrilled by the diffusive, burning harangue of the stump; but to our ears the wild cry of the bird of freedom has become a disagreeable squawk. After a while, its voice got into the throats of demagogues oftener than those of true men, and thus it went out of fashion. Now, when a man begins

to talk about this great and glorious county. and her manifest destiny, we suspect him of a scheme to obtain land grants or subventions for steamship lines-to extend the area of freedom. When he speaks of the sufferings of his community through the want of internal improvements, we suspect him of a desire to get his hand into the meal-bag; and when he says he is ready to lay down his life on the altar of liberty, our suspicions grow almost to convictions. If, in addition to this, he invokes the name of his Maker as to the purity and patriotism of his motives, our mind is made up.

He

A score of years ago and less, it was enough for a man to declaim his glowing tribute to the country: after that he sat down satisfied. His ambition seldom went beyond this, and he would work weeks and months on a speech to perfect it to the standard of his time. Doing this once or twice a year, he thought he was fulfilling all his obligations to his constituency. To talk eloquently was the chief business, and all had the time to listen. Some of the contents which agitated the soul of the old orator, appear to us like tempests in a tea-pot in these latter days, so full of big events. Now, the man who occupies his place does his earnest talking with his colleagues in the committee-room. who speaks in the old way is regarded as superannuated or weak in mind. Now, men are expected to make their points quickly and in a business-like way. The business which was formerly conducted on the floor of the chamber, is rapidly passing into the Committee-room, and the tendency to strangle extended debate is growing stronger every session. The raw member, living in the old traditions, who wishes to " save the country" in a speech modeled after Clay or Webster, is unmercifully knocked down with the gavel, or is sure of a hard fall or two at the hands of experienced athletes who devote themselves to tripping up new men and bringing them under discipline. The utilitarian has killed the orator, and the glory of grand sentences has departed.

The increase of Congressional business. has rendered necessary the transfer of the talking, or at least much of it, from the chamber to the Committee-room. In this way, the Committee-rooms have become miniature legislatures, all working at the same time. Most of the measures which pass through these hidden bodies, are rejected or accepted according to their

internal improvement plan to which the President committed himself in his last inaugural message, and in favor of which members of Congress from different parts of the Union have made speeches. This plan comprises the dredging and clearing out of rivers and the building of locks from the head waters of the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Illinois and the Ohio, down to the Delta, in Louisiana; and the construction of canals through Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana, New York, and other parts of the Union. This project, from a financial point of view, is the most stupendous ever submitted to an American Congress, and what was given in aid of the

appear small in comparison with what will be required for this. There is but little doubt that a sweeping measure of this kind will be passed within a few years, for almost all sections of the Union demand something of the kind, and the members of Congress will strike hands and make a general bargain by which one will help the other in order that all may get what they want.

recommendation. If there is one of too great importance to be acted upon without general debate, the report of the Committee presents the vital points of it, and thus facilitates action in the chamber. Congress has much business before it now, but it has much more in the future. The business has been increasing ever since the centralizing tendencies, developed by the war, have manifested themselves. No man or set of men can be held responsible for these tendencies, for they are in a great measure the logical effects of certain causes which were beyond control. Several agencies have brought this about and are still at work. The extraordinary condition of some of the Southern States calls for feder-construction of the Pacific Railway will al interference and the Executive officer steps in to restore order and a republican form of government. People are getting into the habit of looking to the central government to right them in their wrongs. There is now an outcry against the oppression of telegraph and express companies and great railway corporations, and an appeal is made to the national government to put an end to two of them by purchase, and thus become the owner of several principal lines of railways, like Belgium, to compete with the others in private hands in order to reduce the rates, and of all the telegraphs in order to furnish faithful service as well as low rates. Some remedy must be had, and this is the only one which so far presents itself. If it should be applied, Congress and the President will become the standing directory of a national telegraph company and a national railway company. Whether the remedy is worse than the disease, is a difficult question to determine. Compared to such a project, Nicholas Biddle's National Bank was pale business. The power and the affairs of the central government have been much augmented through its financial department, whose collectors and assessors are stationed in every part of the country, and its banking system which makes every bank responsible for its circulation by deposit of bonds in the hands of the government. Thus, the financial system is a gigantic tree whose roots extend through every state, county and town of the Union. This is in addition to the mysterious power conferred on the Secretary of the Treasury to sell gold and greenbacks and withdraw bonds, at discretion. Besides these elements of centralization, there is another now assuming colossal proportions, the

All this makes business for Congress, and shows how necessary to its expedient dispatch are the Committee-rooms, which may be regarded as threshing and winnowing machines that prepare the wheat for the great hopper-the Legislative Chamber; and it also shows that where there is so much work to be done there is not so much time for talking.

There is necessarily a good deal of acting in legislative debates, and if the truth were known, it would be discovered that a bold front often hides a sinking heart. A man is conscious that his argument has been crushed like an egg-shell by a cunning adversary, and yet he wears the air of a victor. Retreating, he feigns to be advancing; besieged, he looks as if he were laying siege. He tries his best to hide a breach, and direct attention to a point yet unassailed, and if such strategy is transparent to the skilled, it often carries conviction to the galleries and the unpracticed. It is a point of honor to act out the role of one who holds his ground, but occasionally the player throws off the mask in the coat-room before his adversary and frankly acknowledges defeat. This arises partly from native pluck, but more from that settled determination of every member to retain his prestige in the eyes of his constituency, under all circumstances. He is

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