Lord, whom they so deeply and tenderly love. These characters, free, pure, noble, disinterested, strong and brave with the strength and heroism of love, while formed for heaven, and incapable of being formed except for the invisible and eternal, are precisely the characters needed to lift up a fallen society, to found and sustain wise and just government and secure the orderly advance of a true civilization. It was precisely to the formation of such characters as these the monastic life and discipline were adapted. In the monastery and under its discipline men in learning to detach themselves from the world and to live and act only with a view to eternal life, acquired the virtues, the force and strength of character which best fitted them to provide for the wants and necessities of the temporal order. Hence the author says, further on—

"That chivalric courage which the monks daily displayed against sin, against their own weakness, animates them at need against princes and potentates who abuse their authority. It is especially with them that we must seek that moral energy which gives man the force and the desire to resist injustice and to protest against the abuses of power, even when the abuses and injustice fall not directly on himself. This energy, without which the guaranties of order, security, and independence invented by statesmen, are illusory, was inherent in the character and profession of the monks. From the earliest times of their history, and in the midst of the baseness and abjectness of the Byzantine court, they were distinguished among all men as those who spoke with the most freedom to kings, and from century to century, so long as they remained sheltered from the corruptions of the temporal power, they retained this glorious privilege. We shall see it at each page of this recital; we shall see the monk armed with an intrepid boldness, an indomitable courage, against oppression, and comprehend what succor innocence and misfortune found with them in those times when no one feared to be without defence so long as he could invoke against the oppressor the malediction of God and that of the hooded friar. At a thousand years' distance we find the same calm and indomitable courage in the reprimand addressed by St. Benedict to Totila, and in the response of the obscure Prior of Solesmes to the Lord de Sablé, against whom he had to uphold the privileges of his Priory. This lord having met him one day on the bridge in his town, said to him, Monk, if I did not fear God, I would cast you into the Sarthe My lord,' replied the monk, if you feared God, I should have nothing to fear.'

"Thus it was under the dictation of the monks that the Christians who rose against the abuses of power, wrote the civil and po

litical guaranties which they wrested from unjust masters. It was to the keeping of the monks that they confided these charters of their liberties, and in which were written the conditions of their obedience. It was in the cloisters of the monks that were sought not only the sepulchres for kings, nobles, and conquerors, but those also of the weak and the vanquished. There found a last asylum the victims of tyranny, of injustice, of all the excesses of human power. There slept in peace, in the bosom of perpetual prayer, the exiled, the beheaded, and the proscribed. These admirable verses of Statius, inscribed on the Temple of Clemency at Athens, and which the monks have preserved, were found realized in the bosom of the monastic life:

"Sic tutum sacrasse loco mortalibus ægris

Confugium, unde procul starent iræque, minæque,
Regnaque, et a justis Fortuna recederet aris

Huc vieti bellis, patriaque e sede fugati
Conveniunt, pacemque rogant.

"Never were there men who less feared the strong, or less practised cowardly complaisances towards power. In the bosom of the peace and obedience of the cloister, they daily tempered their hearts against injustice, and formed themselves to be the indomitable champions of right and truth. Great characters, hearts truly independent, are nowhere found in greater abundance than under the frock. There were there, and in multitudes, calm and intrepid, erect and lofty as well as humble and fervent souls,-souls whom Pascal calls perfectly heroic. 'Liberty,' says a holy monk of the eighth century, 'succumbs not, for humility freely abdicates it;' and in the depth of the Middle Ages, Peter de Bois, another monk, wrote these noble words, in which are summed up the political code of the epoch and the history of the monastic orders: There are two things for which every Christian must stand, even unto blood-Liberty and Justice. Duo sunt, justitia et libertas, pro quibus quisque fidelis usque ad sanguinem stare debet."—Introduction, pp. xxxvi-xxxix.

The monastic life was neither intended nor suitable for all men, and no one pretends that none but monks or nuns can enter into the kingdom of heaven. But the author shows, as does Father Hecker, in his excellent work entitled Questions of the Soul, that in all ages and nations of the world, choice souls are borne to seek to maintain the combat with sin, and to overcome their weakness in retirement from the world, in solitude and silence, and that from the origin of the Church there have always been those who lived the monastic life, and practised the monastic discipline. It is not absolutely necessary to the existence of the Church, or

*Theb. xii., v. 486.

to the maintenance of the faith, that there should be religious orders distinct from the general ecclesiastical organization, but the virtues, the freedom, the courage, the selfdenial, the love of suffering, the moral heroism which is cherished in the bosom of the monastery, and the victory over the senses and the passions the monastic discipline was intended to secure are necessary for all who aim at Christian perfection, or seek to serve God and do good to the world in their own day and generation. The great merit of the monks was that they not only cultivated and possessed these virtues often in an eminent degree in themselves, but that they sustained them in the general Christian community, and kept up the moral tone and vigor of society. No one denies that in the work done in the ages from St. Benedict to St. Bernard, the priority in achievement, as in rank, state, and authority, belonged to the Popes and Bishops. Without them there had been no Church, and the monastic orders would have been no better than those poor imitations of them which we find among the worshippers of Budha or the followers of Mahomet; but we must not forget the greatest and most eminent of the Popes and Bishops, those who most distinctly impressed their image on their age, were monks, or had been formed in the monastic life and by the monastic discipline, as St. Gregory the Great, St. Gregory VII., St. Austin, the Apostle of Anglo-Saxon England, and St. Boniface, the Apostle of Germany.

In

The reader will find the whole question discussed in the profound and brilliant Introduction, filling nearly three hundred pages, which the author has prefixed to his work, and from which our extracts thus far have been made. it the author gives his views and sentiments in regard to the monastic orders, and the services which they rendered to religion and society. The whole Introduction is marked by the peculiar qualities of the author, and is as remarkable for its depth of thou ht, its comprehensive philosophy, and its far-reaching statesmanlike views, as for its fervid eloquence, simple piety, and earnest faith. In it the author shows us everywhere his unquenchable love of liberty, his knowledge of human nature, and his respect for human reason and manly virtue. The most remarkable chapter is, perhaps, Chapter IX., On the True and False Middle Age, which shows that he has thoroughly studied that period, so variously estimated by modern writers, mastered its spirit, and appreciated its real character. He has

seen and is willing to acknowledge its good and its bad,—its faith and its virtues, also its disorders, its vices, and its crimes. We would, had we space, lay the whole chapter before our readers, but must content ourselves with a single extract:

"The error common both to the admirers and to the detractors of the Middle Ages, is that they see in them the reign and the triumph of theocracy. They are a time,' Donoso Cortes tells us, forever famous by the manifestation of human impotence, and by the glorious dictatorship of the Church.'

"I deny the dictatorship. I deny still more the human impotence. Never was humanity more prolific, more virile, or more powerful. And as to the Church, never did she find her authority more disputed in practice, even by those who with great docility admitted it in theory.

"What reigned then was unity of faith, as we see reign now in all modern nations the unity of the civil law, or of the national constitution. But do we see that in free nations, as England and the United States, this civil and social unity stifles either individual or corporate vitality, energy, and independence? It was the same with the Catholic unity of the Middle Ages. It nowhere extinguished either intellectual or political life. The uniformity of a worship universally popular, the sincere and affectionate submission of hearts and understandings to revealed truth and to the teachings of the Church, excluded no prepossession, no discussion on the highest and most difficult questions of philosophy and morals. The principle of authority implied no rupture either with the free genius of antiquity, so faithfully, so ardently cultivated, as we shall prove, by the Benedictines in their cloisters, or with the natural and progressive development of the human mind. Is it necessary to recall the immense developments of scholasticism, that gymnastic at once rude and subtle of human intelligence, so propitious, notwithstanding its many undeniable gaps, to the force and suppleness of reasoning? Is it necessary to name those great, numerous, and powerful universities, so living, so free, sometimes so rebellious, in which the masters, whose independence was equalled only by that of the ardent and tumultuous youth who flocked to them, broached every day a thousand questions which would frighten the meticulous orthodoxy of our times? Is it, in fine, necessary to evoke the liberty, the license even of those satires which, in the popular and chivalric poetry, in the fabliaux and songs, as well as in the productions of the arts consecrated to religious service, pushed even to excess the right of criticism and public discussion?

"In those times so ridiculously calumniated, souls were inflamed with a devouring passion to know and to act. The heroic and persevering ardor which sent the Marco Polos and the Plancarpins even to the extremities of the known world, athwart distances and

dangers of which our contemporaries have lost the notion, animated travellers no less intrepid in the regions of thought. The human mind with Gerbert and Scotus Erigena exercised itself on problems the most arduous and the most delicate. It recoiled with the most orthodox, such as St. Anselm and St. Thomas, from none of the difficulties of psychology or metaphysics; with some it even ran into theses the most audacious and the most hostile to the spirit of the Church and the Gospel: with nobody, it may be boldly asserted, did it resign itself to the abdication or the sleep of

reason.

"We go farther, and ask, if even now, in spite of printing, the happy but insufficient progress of popular education, the apparent vulgarization of the sciences and the arts, it is quite certain that the equilibrium between material pre-occupations and the moral life of the world is better maintained than it was then; if the spiritual element of human nature, if the cultivation of ideas, if moral enthusiasm, if all that which constitutes the noble life of thought is as well represented, as energetically developed, as liberally provided for with us as with our fathers? For myself I doubt it, and I believe, all things considered and well compared, never have men been more richly endowed than in the Middle Ages, or have more ardently cultivated the domain of the soul and the understanding.

"Religion reigned over all, it is true, but it stifled nothing. It was not relegated to a corner of society, nor shut up within the walls of its temples or the individual conscience; on the contrary it was invited to animate, enlighten, and permeate all with its spirit of life, and, after having seated the edifice on an immovable foundation, to crown its summit with its light and its beauty. No one was placed too high to obey it, and no one could fall so low as to escape its consolations and protection. From the king to the hermit, all at certain moments felt the power of its pure and generous inspirations. The memory of the Redemption, of the debt contracted towards God by man ransomed on Calvary, mingled with all, and was found in all institutions, in all monuments, and, at moments, in all souls. The victory of charity over selfishness, of humility over pride, of spirit over matter, of all that which is elevated in our nature over all that which is ignoble and impure, was as frequent as is compatible with human infirmity. Never has this victory been complete here below; but it may be fearlessly as serted that never had it come nearer to being complete. Since the grand defiance given to evil triumphant on earth by the establishment of Christianity, never, perhaps, was the empire of Satan more shaken, or nearer being overthrown.

"But shall we therefore conclude that the Middle Ages constituted a sort of ideal of Christian society? Must we see in them the normal state of the world? God forbid. There never was and there never will be a normal state, or an irreproachable epoch VOL. II.-No. II.

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