“It must never be forgotten that this organisation of offices within the convent was useful in its best days. Where in the whole world of the thirteenth century can we meet with so completely framed and active a system as that of a Benedictine House? Not, certainly, in the feudal castle, with its fierce warrior-lord and turbulent horde of ‘devils, not men,’ as the English Chronicle calls them; not in the mediæval city, with powers and privileges still uncertain and precarious, though there was here, perhaps, a nearer parallel than elsewhere; not even in King’s courts, which came and went, and had not yet developed their complete _chancellerie_, nor had learnt the importance of ministers and departments of administration. In a well-ordered monastery, with its eighteen or twenty obedientiaries, life went on smoothly and prosperously. There only were the divisions of time fully understood, and the importance of time appreciated; there only were the departments of work, the directions of industry, carefully marked out; there too the main principle of official responsibility began early to be asserted.” As to “the stories of corruption and immorality on which sinful minds have ever fastened greedily,” writes the Dean in another place, “they have attracted far more than a fair amount of notice and attention, and have given the excuse for those interested and truthless persons, who, in the Reformation time and in later days too, have thought to honour God by blackening wholesale the monastic character. _Deo per mendacium gratificari_ is still far too often the guiding line of many a polemic, who tries to win his battle by flinging dirt in the faces of his opponents.... In these respects the brethren at St. Swithun’s may look the world in the face without fear.” It is not within the province of an English Churchman to deal with the maintenance of monasticism on our shores by those of the Roman obedience, save to say that its flickering stealthy flame survived continuously in glimmers of light in spite of bitter and now obsolete statutes; and further to note that the oppressive action that drove large numbers of “religious” men and women from France to England a century ago has been renewed in recent days. Those most competent to judge have no hesitation in believing that the various orders of religious men and women of the Roman communion in this country are doing an inestimable service--educational, charitable, and spiritual--to those of their own faith. Our best literary critics recognise too the genuine work that not a few are doing in elucidating history, and in other ways adding to the general sum of human knowledge; whilst all Englishmen can well afford to be proud of the attainments and researches of Dr. Gasquet, the abbot-president of the English Benedictines.