The church was always the principal building of a monastery. Many of them remain entire, though despoiled of their shrines, and tombs, and altars, and costly furniture, and many more remain in ruins, and they fill us with astonishment at their magnitude and splendour. Our existing cathedrals were, in fact, abbey churches; nine or ten of them were the churches of Benedictine monasteries, the remainder of secular Augustines. But these, the reader may imagine, had the wealth of bishops and the offerings of dioceses lavished upon them, and may not be therefore fair examples of ordinary abbey churches. But some of them originally were ordinary abbey churches, and were subsequently made Episcopal sees, such as Beverley, Gloucester, Christ Church Oxford, and Peterborough, which were originally Benedictine abbey churches; Bristol was the church of a house of regular canons; Ripon was the church of a college of secular canons. The Benedictine churches of Westminster and St. Alban's, and the collegiate church of Southwell, are equal in magnitude and splendour to any of the cathedrals; and the ruins of Fountains, and Tintern, and Netley, show that the Cistercians equalled any of the other orders in the magnitude and beauty of their churches. It is indeed hard to conceive that communities of a score or two of monks should have built such edifices as Westminster and Southwell as private chapels attached to their monasteries. And this, though it is one aspect of the fact, is not the true one. They did not build them for private chapels to say their daily prayers in; they built them for temples in which they believed that the Eternal and Almighty condescended to dwell; to whose contemplation and worship they devoted their lives. They did not think of the church as an appendage to their monastery, but of their monastery as an appendage to the church. The cloister, under the shadow and protection of the church, was the court of the Temple, in which its priests and Levites dwelt. The church of a monastery was almost always a cross church, with a nave and aisles; a central tower (in Cistercian churches the tower was only to rise one story above the roof); transepts, which usually have three chapels on the north side of each transept, or an aisle divided into three chapels by parclose screens; a choir with or without aisles; a retro-choir or presbytery; and often a Lady chapel, east of the presbytery, or in some instances parallel with the choir.