First of all, the monasteries kept before the minds both of parish priests and of their people the ideal of an unambitious, self-denying, studious, meditative, religious life. No doubt many of the monks and nuns fell short of their own ideal, and there were occasional scandals; we find notices in the registers of the bishops of their intervention in such cases. But the lives of the majority were sufficiently respectable to maintain the credit of the institution, and there were always some whose lives were exemplary. We may produce an evidence of the general feeling on the subject from the report of the commissioners of Henry VIII., who were sent to inquire into the state of the smaller monasteries, with a view to their suppression. The report stated that there were all sorts of abuses and scandals in the smaller houses, and recommended that they should be suppressed, and that their inhabitants should be transferred to "the great solemn monasteries of this realm, wherein--thanks be to God--religion is right well kept and observed." As to their report against the smaller houses; they had been employed on purpose to make out a case against them, and the world has long since come to the conclusion that their adverse testimony is not to be believed.
If we are right in these enlightened days in thinking that fine public buildings for the housing of parliaments, municipal corporations, and the like civil institutions of the nation tend to give dignity to the national life; and that galleries of sculpture and painting, and museums of art, exercise an elevating influence on the popular mind; it can hardly be denied that the religious houses, with their stately groups of buildings, their sublime churches, and the numerous beautiful works of sculpture, painting, embroidery, and goldsmiths' work which they contained, must have had a similar influence upon the religious sentiment and the æsthetic education of the people. A mediæval town was greatly the richer, religiously and intellectually, for having a great monastery in its suburb. The half-dozen religious houses--great and small--in a rural county had a religious, civilizing, elevating influence over the whole country-side. Even their empty ruins have not lost all their influence. The stately relics of the Yorkshire abbeys give added interest and dignity to the great northern county. What would the Isle of Ely be without the solemn grandeur of its cathedral church?