The Commissioners had particular instructions for the women's convents. 'Is your house perfectly closed?' they asked the abbess and the nuns. 'Can a man get into it?[192] Are you in the habit of writing love-letters?'[193] At Litchfield the nuns declared that there was no disorder in the convent; but one good old woman told everything, and when Leighton reproached the prioress for her falsehood, she replied: 'Our religion compels us to it. At our admission we swore never to reveal the secret sins that were committed among us.'[194] There were some houses in which nearly all the nuns trampled under foot the most sacred duties of their sex, and were without mercy for the unhappy fruits of their disorders. Such were frequently in those times the monastic orders of the West. The eloquent apologists who eulogize their virtues without distinction, and the exaggerating critics who pronounce the same sentence of condemnation against all, are both mistaken. We have rendered homage to the monks who were upright; we may blame those who were guilty. The scandals, let us say, did not proceed from the founders of these orders. Sentiments, opposed beyond a doubt to the principles of the Gospel, although they were well-intentioned, had presided over the formation of the monasteries. The hermits Paul, Anthony, and others of the third and fourth centuries gave themselves up to an anti-Evangelical asceticism, but still they struggled courageously against temptation. However, one must be very ignorant not to see that corruption must eventually issue from monastic institutions. _Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted up_, is the language of the Gospel. We do not exaggerate. The monasteries were sometimes an asylum in which men and women, whose hearts had been wrecked in the tempests of life, sought a repose which the world did not offer. They were mistaken; they ought to have lived with God, but in the midst of society. And yet there is a pleasure in believing that behind those walls, which hid so much corruption, there were some elect souls who loved God. Such were found at Catesby, at Godstow, near Oxford, and in other places. The Visitors asked for the preservation of these houses.