ABSTRACT

We have seen that, towards the close of the age with which we are concerned, thoughtful and perceptive men, observers like Stow, Willet, and Fuller, came to reflect with pride on the immensity of the achievement which had been wrought in England by private charity. And well they might, for in the course of these years the curse of poverty had been chastened, humane care had been arranged for the derelict, and the area of opportunity for aspiring youth had been enormously enlarged. A quiet but a veritable revolution had occurred during which private donors, men who held in view a vision of the future, had repaired the damage society had sustained from the slow ruin of the Middle Ages and had then laid firmly and surely the foundation of the liberal society of which we are the inheritors. It was a revolution too in which men's aspirations for their own generation and those to come had undergone an almost complete metamorphosis, as the essentially religious interests of the later Middle Ages yielded to social aspirations which were most aggressively secular and which wrested from the church the control and the direction of the institutions which lend care to men's bodies and tuition to their minds. The historical price the great donors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exacted for the immense contributions which they made was the secularization of the society and its institutions.