We deplore the loss of works of art and antiquity, but we must not judge from a nineteenth-century and American standpoint. Had papist institutions been left where for centuries they had been entrenched, Protestantism could have made little headway. People of low intellect, with its accompanying ignorance and superstition, are best reached through the senses. Pageants, images, pictures, devout genuflections, were powerful then as now. The authorities of the Roman Church knew this as they now know it. The new Protestant government of England realized that these religious emblems were great obstacles in its way, and was uncompromising in their extermination. The next generation, coming up under a new administration, was more tractable. This was unavoidable, if the rulers would prevent friction in the new machinery. Let us not speak ill of the bridge that carried freedom and toleration safely over. This cathedral was for various causes an object of hostility. The adjacent green was fortified, and was alternately in possession of each party; and of course the cathedral suffered the injuries of a constant siege. History has it that two thousand cannon-shot and fifteen hundred hand-grenades were discharged against it. The central spire was battered down, and the others shared nearly the same fate. The statuary of the west front, around these towers, was shattered; the painted windows were broken; the monuments were mutilated; and the mural stones were stripped of their brasses. Dugdale says:-- It was greatly profaned by Cromwell's soldiers, who hunted a cat every day in it with hounds, and delighted themselves with the echo of their sport along the vaulted roofs. Nor was this all; they profaned it still further by bringing a calf into it, wrapt in linen, which they carried to the font, and there sprinkled it with water, and gave it a name in scorn and derision of the holy sacrament. When Bishop Hackett was appointed to the See in 1661 he found the cathedral in this hopeless confusion; but, in spite of such discouraging conditions, on the very morning after his arrival he prepared for improvements. With laudable zeal he aroused his servants early, set his coach-horses, with teams and laborers, to removing the rubbish, and himself laid the first hand to the work. A subscription soon amounted to $45,000, of which the bishop contributed $10,000. The dean and chapter contributed a like sum; and the remainder was raised by the bishop, who solicited aid from every nobleman and gentleman in the diocese, and of almost every stranger who visited the cathedral. He obtained from Charles II. a grant of one hundred timber-trees out of Needwood Forest, and in eight years saw his cathedral perfectly restored. With joy and great solemnity it was re-consecrated Dec. 24, 1669. The next year Bishop Hackett contracted for six bells, only one of which was hung in his lifetime. His biographer Plume says:--