reformed Christianity this restored identity of the God of nature and the God of revelation has been recognized, and turned into a practical fact.

There cannot be a doubt that the celibacy of the clergy was a direct offshoot from the establishment of Monasticism. The transition from the one to the other is but a step, and it is immediate. They were monks and abbots who first preached up the superior virtue of a single life. The Pope, who enforced it upon all the clergy, even to compulsory divorce on all who had wives, was himself of the monkish order. What the great council of Nicæa had attempted in vain, Hildebrand accomplished at once, effectually, and for ever.

In examining, then, into the question of Monasticism, we shall be virtually examining into the grounds of an enforced celibacy; for the two things stand or fall together. The monastic life is voluntary celibacy-the priestly life is enforced celibacy: the one has respect to an individual, the other to a corporation. If we are to believe the advocates of this system, God (if we may be allowed so to speak) made a great mistake when He created woman, and gave her to be a "help-meet" for man.

Not, however, to prejudge in the case, we will hear what the Count de Montalembert has to say in favour of a system which Protestants have universally agreed in condemning and putting aside, as not consonant with the laws either of nature or of God. What, then, is the ground on which the author bases his defence of the monastic ordinance? To what does he trace its origin? "In the depths of human nature," he says, "there exists, without doubt, a tendency instinctive, though confused and evanescent, towards retirement and solitude." (p. 20.) To this supposed natural instinct he ascribes the rise of the monastic institution; but here, in the first place, he betrays an ignorance of human nature, and overlooks fact. So far from human nature exhibiting a tendency to solitude, it has always exhibited a tendency to society, (hence the congregation of men in cities and towns); and so far from man's instinctively loving privacy or loneliness, he has from the first yearned after communion with others of his own kind, and especially after communion with his second self in the female sex. The reverse, at least, has been the exception, and not the rule. It is true, persons of a poetic temperament, or of a strongly reflective turn, are fond of occasional retirement and solitude; and also that, under bereavements and bitter disappointments, almost all human beings will flee from society for a time; but those who have shut themselves up in monasteries have been anything but poetical in their temper, and our author himself maintains that it is "an error to regard it (the monastic institute) as a refuge for sorrowful souls, fatigued and discon

tented with their lot in the world." (p. 26.) The monastic mode of life is, we must observe, much older than Christianity, which of itself proves it not to have been specially Christian: and it most certainly did not take its rise originally from the love of solitude; for the monk of Thibet or of India, who existed long before the monks of the Romish church arose, seeks publicity rather than privacy, and is ostentatious of his devotions rather than otherwise. A much more probable origin of the system is the opinion, which very early got possession of men's minds, of the inherent corruption of matter, and the desire to purify it by some self-invented human means. To this the Count de Montalembert himself has traced it, and unwittingly acknowledged its true origin in his statement, that its object was "the expiation of its (human nature's) native guilt by a life of sacrifice and mortification." (p. 12.) Here, then, we have Monasticism identified with Natural Religion or Heathenism, in its moving principle and tendency; and this, together with the date of its first appearance, fixes at once its ante-Christian as well as anti-Christian character.

The monastic life, under its christianized aspect, it must not be forgotten, arose first in the East-that genial region for abstraction and contemplation, for hair garments and meagre diet-and not in the West: that was, too, the native region of Gnosticism, and its first cousin, Manichæism; and though it assumed there the anchorite rather than the cenobitical form, yet, in all its essential characteristics, it was the same with that of the West. Both systems germinated out of the same deep-hid law of human nature, the law of self-justification, rather than the love of solitude. Between the Christian monks of Nitria, and the Therapeutæ of the older faith, the Essenes of India, and the monks who held the creed of Zoroaster and of Buddha, there is a substantial agreement. In no respect is the Monachism of Antony, of Pacomius, and of Hilarion different, except in form, from that of the wildest oriental fakir. The Teutonic character only infused into the monks of the West more of the energy of active and laborious self-denial, making them spiritual Athletes, where the others were only Contemplatives.

There were many things to recommend Monachism to earnest minds in the middle ages. With the monks of that period, there was a species of knighthood established to attract and to gratify worldly ambition under the form of religion. To enter the lists of a monastic Order was, to the high spirits of that day, like what it is to our young men to enter the army. It was a system of spiritual Don Quixotism in fighting with the devil under every imaginable form of fantastic chivalry. Charlemagne entitled the abbots of his empire, Chevaliers de l'Eglise Montalembert styles them Chevaliers de Dieu. We can quite believe that at that period "noble spirits, hearts

truly independent, were to be found nowhere more frequently, than under the cowl" (p. 33); but though this be a fact, this by no means justifies the perversion of human energies, and of God's best ordinance, which the system involves.

Our author is most enthusiastic, as might be expected from so thorough a Romanist, in his admiration of the monastic Orders. "I owe to them," he says, "in a point of view merely human, my thanks for having reconciled me to men, by opening to me a world in which I hardly ever found either an egotist or a liar, an ungrateful or a servile soul." (p. 36.) This is high praise, and, were it well founded, would do much to reconcile us to the system; but things, we know, take their colour from the medium through which we look at them; besides, an institution may be pure at its first rise, which, from its very constitution, soon becomes corrupt. There are two sides to every question. Admitting that there was much in the monastic institute that was noble at its outset, and that it numbered in its ranks some individuals of the purest virtue, what shall we say to the iniquities of the Alexandrian Cyril, to the crimes of Innocent III., to the ferocious proceedings of monks against heretics, to the murders and bloodsheds that have stained their annals? Where could we find more atrocious miscreants than the Abbot Arnold, or Peter the monk of Vaux Cernay? The truth is, if history be true, that the monks, taken as a body, sinned against almost every virtue human and divine, against respect for the other sex, against charity and kindly feeling, against tolerance and equity, against faith and godliness; their perfection of which they boasted consisted of a congeries of imperfections, of moral contortions and monstrosities. Breaking all family laws, setting at nought all feelings of tenderness and affection, and often even the first principles of justice, to carry out the ends of their institute, they constituted anomalies in Humanity, and became fossilized Christians rather than living, warm-hearted, loving benefactors among their kind. For their whole religion, under its best aspect, consisted rather in chastising their own natural desires, than in sharing others' burdens, or in promoting others' happiness.

The Count de Montalembert, being a Frenchman, evidently appears to have had his judgment biassed in favour of the ancient monkish system, by what he has witnessed and experienced of the habits of society in these later days. Hence he speaks of them as "burying in the cloister a grandeur and a power of which the diminished grandeurs, ephemeral and unconsidered, of our modern society can give no idea" (p. 57); and he describes them as "good men, who were able to live at an equal distance from the unrestrained license and the abject servility which alternately characterise our modern society." (p. 36.) We sympathise fully with his hatred for despotism and his love of freedom; but we differ entirely from him in his opinion

that Monasticism presented "the highest ideal of Christianity." Nor, though the monks were the friends of freedom in feudal times, when the world was governed by a few absolute tyrants, can we regard their system as an example of true freedom. The monks were rather strange compounds of freedom and oppression; of love of truth and dread of investigation; of independence and servility; and their obedience was rather passive submission to a prescribed rule, than enlightened deference to a living law. Their system necessarily generated that hard unfeeling bigotry which is the worst of all tyranny, and which always springs up in associated bodies, be they Protestant or Romish, which have a sectarian character.

It is a beautiful description of the monastic life, that which the Count de Montalembert gives us ; with its solitude and its quiet; its freedom from domestic cares and worldly anxieties; its continually recurring rounds of prayer; its hours of calm and cloudless contemplation; its silence and sober cheerfulness; its happy absence of the torments of ambition; its sociality, without the family's annoyances, where "all are blended," as he expresses it, "in the holy equality of a voluntary humility." (p. 56.) This is the poetry of religion. It might, indeed, be called playing at religion; for, to quote the words of St. Chrysostom, they (the monks) wage war with the devil as if they were playing." He uses this expression to describe the cheerfulness, the freedom from all sadness, with which the monks carried on their holy warfare. It was, we must suppose, this factitious aspect of what was termed the religious life, or apparently holy beauty, that fascinated our own Dr. Johnson, when he thus spoke of it, as quoted by the Count de Montalembert: "I never read of a hermit, but in imagination I kiss his feet; never of a monastery, but I fall on my knees and kiss the pavement." There was much in good old Dr. Johnson's temperament to dispose him to look favourably upon monastic institutions, though we can hardly realize to ourselves his unwieldly form falling on bended knees to kiss the pavement! His constitutional melancholy, his strong natural superstition, evidenced by his prayers for his dead wife, will sufficiently account for his all but adoring reverence for monkhood. But there is another way of looking at the matter. If the whole system were a mistake, it was a fearful mistake, pernicious in time, and tremendous in respect to eternity. And in reference to this, we cannot do better than quote the words of the eloquent Bossuet, though a Romanist: "Place happiness where it ought to be, and it is the source of all good: place it where it ought not to be, and it is the source of all evil.”

To discover the root from which the system sprang, which so speedily overran the whole of Christendom, we have only to cite the extravagant language used by its promoters in regard to its spiritual merit. "Give me," said St. Eloy to his

master, "this site, that I may construct there a ladder by which you and I shall mount to the celestial kingdom." Another devotee, Count d'Orlamunde, declared, "He who erects or repairs a monastery builds himself stairs to ascend to heaven." So completely had the monastic system taken possession of the Christian mind in the middle ages, that the word religion came to mean a religious Order; and to become a religieux, entrer en religion, signified to enter into a monastery or a nunnery. St. Bernard was himself the father of 160 monasteries. From the seventh to the ninth century the Benedictines "gave to the church" Belgium, England, Germany, and Scandinavia. The remains of monasteries are to be found everywhere in Ireland and Scotland. So universal, indeed, had these institutions become throughout Europe at the time of the Reformation, that one-fifth, we think it was, of the whole soil was then in their possession.

The Count de Montalembert is greatly concerned that so widely ramified a system, realizing, in his imagination, the true ideal of heaven upon earth,* should have been subject, as it has been in these later (he would not say more enlightened) ages, to so general a condemnation, and to so ruthless an overthrow. "It has been calculated that in five years, between 1830 and 1835, three thousand monasteries have disappeared from the face of Europe. In the kingdom of Portugal alone three hundred were destroyed under the regency of Don Pedro; two hundred others were drowned in the blood of Poland; and now the destruction is further spreading through that garden of the Papacy-Italy itself."

It would be hardly possible to realize what our own England was in respect to monasteries at the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. Almost every peculiarly fertile spot, where there was fat pasture and plenty of water for fish, was occupied by one of them. Their ruins, or antique remains, testify to this day to their gigantic structures. And what was their social effect upon the neighbourhood around? That the monks were eminently charitable in the sense of alms-givingprayers and alms being their two great functions no one will deny. But what did this create? A host of beggars; so that monkery and mendicancy walked hand in hand. So completely was the land overrun with them upon the suppression of the monasteries, that they had to be put down by force of law. By acts passed in the reign of Henry VIII., every penalty, except that of imprisonment, was enacted against a beggar. Almsgiving to a beggar was made a crime. A mendicant was to be whipped for the first offence, branded for the second, and hanged for the third. In the reign of Edward VI.,

"There is nothing which approaches nearer to heaven than a monastery inhabited by monks who have willingly separated themselves from the world." (p. 274.)