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In view of the undisputed purity and fearlessness of these noble monks, a recital of their woes will place the case for the monastic institution in the most favorable light. Channey says the year 1533 was ushered in with signs, the end of the world was nigh. Yes, the monk's world was drawing to a close; the moon, for him, was turning into blood, and the stars falling from heaven.
They were not allowed to stay the course of the Reformation; but their sufferings, nobly borne, sufficed to recover the sympathy of after-ages for the faith which they professed. Ten righteous men were found in the midst of the corruption to purchase for Romanism a few more centuries of tolerated endurance. To return to the narrative of Maurice Channey.
The writer was a certain Maurice Channey, probably an Irishman. He went through the same sufferings with the rest of the brethren, and was one of the small fraction who finally gave way under the trial. He was set at liberty, and escaped abroad; and in penance for his weakness, he left on record the touching story of his fall, and of the triumph of his bolder companions.
"Then all who were present," says Channey, "burst into tears, and cried with one voice, 'Let us die together in our integrity, and heaven and earth shall witness for us how unjustly we are cut off. "The prior answered, sadly, 'Would, indeed, that it might be so; that so dying we might live, as living we die but they will not do to us so great a kindness, nor to themselves so great an injury.
The pages of Channey are filled with the most improbable stories of miracles, but his charming picture of the cloister life of the Carthusians is doubtless true to reality. The Carthusian fathers were the best fruit of monasticism in England. To a higher degree than any of the other monastic orders they maintained a good discipline and preserved the spirit of their founders.
The facts are given at length by Froude, in his "History of England," who bases his account on the narrative of Maurice Channey, one of the monks who escaped death by yielding to the king.
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