monastery of Parkminster is dedicated.  I have here no room to speak of him, the true founder of the Order in England, of his holy, brave and laborious life in Selwood or of his rule there of ten years.  He is forgotten even at Witham and his name no longer, alas, means anything to us whom he served.  Only the Carthusians have not forgotten, and to the keeping of no other saint in the Calendar could they so honourably have entrusted their new house.

This monastery, founded in the Weald, upon October 17, 1877, is a great, if not a beautiful, pile of buildings, and is, in fact, one of the largest houses of the Order in the world.  The visitor rings at the gate, and is admitted by a lay-brother dressed in the beautiful white habit, caught about the waist by a leathern girdle from which a rosary hangs.  Upon his feet are rough shoes and his head is shorn but he greets you with a smile of welcome and leads you into a large quadrangle, where before you is the great Romanesque church with a chapel upon one side and the refectory upon the other, and all about are cloisters.  Here over the entrance to the church is a statue of St Hugh.  Within, the church is divided by a screen into two parts, the choir for the Fathers, the nave for the lay-brothers.  Over the screen is a rood, and beneath, two altars, dedicated in honour of St John the Baptist, who went into the desert, and St Bruno, the founder of the Order.  From the church one is led to the Chapter House, in which there stands an altar and Crucifix, and there upon the walls are depicted scenes from the martyrdom of the London Carthusians in the time of Henry VIII.  From the Chapter House one is led to the Chapel of the Relics, where there is a beautiful silver reliquary that belonged to the English Carthusians before the Reformation, and in it is a relic of St Thomas of Canterbury.  Here, too, is the stole of St Hugh and a bone of St Bruno.

The monastery proper lies behind the church, where a vast quadrangle, the Great Cloister, some three acres in extent, opens out, surrounded on three sides by the little houses of the monks, with the graveyard in the midst.  Here the monks live, and are buried without coffin or shroud in their white habits, the hood drawn over the face.  The cells are delightful to look upon, “a solitude within a solitude”; each consists of five rooms, two below and three above, reached by a staircase, the whole approached from a passage closed by a door giving on to the Great Cloister.  Here live and pray some thirty-six monks, with a like number of conversi or lay-brothers.

I do not know in all England a place more peaceful than this one, more solemn and salutary to visit in the confusion of our modern life.  Here is one of the lightning conductors that preserves the modern world from the wrath of God.  Let others think as they will, for me the monastery of St Hugh in the Weald is holy ground.