beggars might be seized on as slaves, and for a second offence might be held in slavery by any one who would claim them for life. Immense numbers of sturdy beggars were hanged in the reign of Elizabeth. These were severe measures, undoubtedly; but they serve to show at this day what an Egyptian plague social vermin had become. The fact is, the monasteries kept alive a turbulent class of sturdy beggars, who, finding themselves fed gratuitously, would not work. It may, indeed, be laid down as a rule, that all societies of idlers are an evil; and they exaggerate the evil, when they maintain a host of mendicants around them. For, as Dr. Vicesimus Knox has well said, "though to feed and clothe the poor is good, to teach them how to feed and clothe themselves is better." "Monasteries were never intended," the Count de Montalembert tells us, " to collect the invalids of the world" (p. 25); and yet, on the same page, he speaks of the ruin of the religious orders as a "public calamity," on the ground of the frightful increase of suicides, as testified each year by the criminal statistics. If they did not exist as hospitals, what social good did they exist for? They certainly did not help to provide the State with useful subjects. And this the Count thinks to be the greatest of their alleged crimes; namely, that they "stayed the progress of population." But here he steals a triumph from political economy. "We know," he says, "what has become of that reproach now-a-days. It is almost as if God had waited till the lie had achieved its triumph to overwhelm it with confusion." But we have a better authority than Malthus. "In the multitude of people," says Scripture, "is the king's honour; but in the want of people is the destruction of the prince." (Prov. xiv. 28.) There is one thing the Count fully admits, and that is the general corruption of the secular clergy in the middle ages. Nor does he deny, but most sternly condemns, the corruption and degeneracy into which the Regulars fell in the period just preceding the Reformation. This is his testimony with regard to the first: "There were more saints, more monks, more believers than in our days; but I do not hesitate to say there were fewer priests; I mean, good priests. Yes, the secular clergy in the middle ages were less pure, less exemplary than ours; the episcopate less respectable, and the spiritual authority of the Holy See less sovereign than now." (p. 210.) With respect to the second, though he admits the ultimate corruption, he defends the system. According to him, the monks were, in their early uncorrupted state, the greatest benefactors that ever set foot upon the soil of Europe. They saved the decaying remains of the Roman empire. They restrained and humanized the northern barbarians, who had made their desolating inroads upon it. "The Roman empire without the barbarians," to use his own words, was an abyss of servitude 66 and corruption. The barbarians without the monks were chaos. The barbarians and the monks united recreated a world which was to be called Christendom." (p. 281.) No doubt there is some truth in this. The monks, like megatheriums, cleared forests: they were the pioneers of civilization among comparative savages, doing its rough work. But in all this, we may easily believe they were unconscious instruments in the hands of a higher Power. Their ultimate object, there can be little question, was the aggrandisement of their own Order by the subjugation of mankind to their system of pseudo-Christianity; and in this they succeeded to such an extent that they became at last, by the confession of our author, "the greatest corporation and the largest landholder" in Europe. No wonder that with this they became corrupt. It was but the natural law of wealth. The only question is, whether this consequence was merely an accident, or whether it was the inherent genuine tendency of their association. No one who knows human nature need be at any loss for the answer. What is the definition of a monk, as given by the Count de Montalembert? "A monk is a Christian who puts himself apart from the world in order more surely to work out his salvation." Again: "To make sure of his salvation, he would do more than is necessary to save him." (p. 288.) Here we have the inner principle of the system enunciated. This stamps it at once as a system of self-righteousness, and of hideous presumption towards God. Such a statement as the one we have quoted betrays a fearful ignorance of the evangelical system of justification for a sinner, as clearly set forth in the Bible, and of the whole grounds of evangelical obedience. The true Christian obeys the law of God because he is saved, not in order to be saved; and so far from having the presumption to think that he can do more than is necessary, when he has done all, he acknowledges himself an unprofitable servant. But the crucial test of monastic Christianity was its triumph over the laws of nature and of God in respect to the married life. In order to accomplish this, the monk separated himself from his kind, shut himself up in a cell, wore a hair shirt, subjected himself to long fasts, and to macerations and flagellations so severe and shocking that even to read of them is no light penance; in some cases ate grass like an ox, instead of cooked food; and when he had thus ceased to be human, imagined himself to be divine! A strange perversion in a man's vision must have taken place before he could discern the slightest correspondence between this kind of religion and the life presented in the New Testament, enjoined by St. Paul, and exemplified by St. Peter. The Count de Montalembert thinks that he finds examples of the monastic life in such persons as Samuel, Elisha, the Recha was of Christian origin. The rites of Cybele existed long before Christianity was introduced; and when her worship, originally intended in honour of virginity, passed into Greece, we know what it became, practically, in the Eleusinian Mysteries. The monks of later times were but the "Corybantes" under a Christian name. The Romans had also their "Vestals," till they were abolished by Theodosius the Great. Virgin purity is to be honoured; but where has God ever enjoined the virgin state as of religious obligation? And how can a human quality-one, too, which may be the mere accident of birth or of condition-form a proper ground or object of worship? The crowning condemnation of the monastic system is, that it sets up an antagonism between the religious and the social virtues. What greater insult could be offered to every natural feeling than the case of Euphrosyne, which is thus recorded with marked approbation by the Count de Montalembert :— "There was the beautiful and learned Euphrosyne, who, at eighteen, deserted her father and her husband; and to escape the better from their search, obtained admission, by concealing her sex, into a monastery, where she remained thirty-eight years without leaving her cell." (p. 326.) The following are the terms in which the author speaks of these violations of the law alike of Nature and of duty. (Euphrosyne, it must be borne in mind, was a noble Roman lady, who left her husband for a monastery, and practised a lie to conceal her sex-she, a woman, living for thirty-eight years among men as a man!) "This is," he says, "a type of innocent vocations, and the first detailed and authentic example of those contests between the cloister and the family, which have been renewed during so many centuries for the glory of God and the salvation of souls." (p. 330.) If we are to admit the principle upon which Monasticism is based, we must believe that one half of human kind, and that the gentler half, are essentially polluting. Even to speak to a woman without the presence of a third person, was treated by St. Columbanus as a crime, to be punished either by "two days fasting on bread and water," or, which was the other alternative, two hundred blows." "He who, on a journey, should have slept under the same roof with a woman, had to fast three days on bread and water," or to accept of its equivalent in "three hundred blows." (Vol. ii. p. 450.) Thus woman, who was given of God to man to be his companion in life, and the preserver, not the corrupter, of his purity, and whose society, under the wise restrictions of the moral law, has a softening and refining influence, is treated by the monkish institute as a creature always to be avoided-a pollution to man, of whom she is the better part. How can this possibly be the case, when marriage was instituted in the time of man's innocency? It was the Almighty Himself, not Adam, who said, "It is not good that the man should be alone." An inspired apostle has also pronounced that marriage is "honourable in all." Woman, beyond denial, has some peculiar weaknesses; and when she once becomes corrupted, is turned into the most vicious and corrupting of creatures; but woman, when the weak points of her character have been corrected by judicious training, and she has been taught to know her proper place and duty relatively to man, so that, instead of yielding to, she guards against those dispositions and tendencies which would destroy his happiness by destroying his reposeful confidence, is the very best blessing a God of mercy has bestowed upon man, constituted as is his nature, and trying as is now his condition. It is she, in fact, who throws sunshine, with all its healthiness, into his earthly existence. But her moral security, as well as his, lies in the married state; and when to the amenities there are added the sanctities of domestic life, there is no higher or happier state for them both on earth. It is a ferocism to represent that state as impure; it is purity itself to the sexes, because it is oneness, as Adam, before Eve was taken out of him, was one and perfect. The marriage state was re-enacted under Christian sanctions, not placed under a ban, as being the great conservator of man's chastity; and he who forbids it, as in anywise corrupting to man, forbids what God has enjoined, and charges man's Maker with folly. "It is better to have scandal than a lie," our author says in one place; and in this we quite agree with him. But if the monks are not very much belied, anything but strict chastity prevailed among them, in the proper sense of the word. History has charged them with even unnatural crimes; and at all events there is too much ground for believing that the exclamation of St. Francis d'Assisi was founded in some sinister experience. "Alas!" he exclaimed, "at the moment when God forbad us wives, Satan has, I fear, given us sisters." So im At the distance of only thirty years from the death of the founder of the Franciscan Order, we find Bonaventura, the greatest of his successors in the government of that Order, thus addressing his provincial ministers: "The indolence of our brethren is laying open the path to every vice. They are immersed in carnal repose. They roam up and down everywhere, burthening every place in which they come. portunate are their demands, and such their rapacity, that it has become no less terrible to fall in with them than with so many robbers. So sumptuous is the structure of their magnificent buildings, as to bring us all into discredit. So frequently are they involved in those culpable intimacies which our rule prohibits, that suspicion, scandal, and reproach have been excited against us." What, too, is the confession of another ardent admirer of St. Francis? In the 22nd book of the Paradiso, the Milton of Italy writes: "So soft is flesh of mortals, that on earth A good beginning doth no longer last Than while an oak may bring its fruit to birth. Or silver, I built mine by prayer and fast ;- If thou reflect how each began, then view Thou'lt see the white assume the darkest hue. Greater than those here needful.” (Wright's Dante.) The man who can defend a system that is so spoken of by its own adherents and admirers, must be acknowledged, at the least, to possess all the chivalry of a Don Quixote. But even in the lowest depth there is a lower deep. Our author tells us, approvingly, of some "who reduced themselves in some degree to the state of savages, and who were surnamed Browsers (Bookоt), because they had no other food than the mountain herbs, which they cut every morning with a knife, and ate uncooked." (p. 342.) What, too, is the description given of himself by Francis Xavier, the famed missionary of the Jesuits? He describes himself as a man (to use his own forcible language) "so abhorred of the earth, that the very vermin which crawled over him loathed their wretched fare!" How does the true monk pass his days? What is the kind of life to which he addicts himself? Behold him! Clad in the coarsest of garments, he stands apart from his kind, an austere and solitary man; with a heart formed for tenderness like others, yet mortifying even his best affections; his time is passed in a round of petty observances or uncommanded austerities; the service he renders is mechanical rather than reasonable passive rather than spontaneous; he has given up his own will only to be subject to the will of another, neither wiser nor better than himself; he resorts to strange unnatural means of tormenting his senses by way of subduing his own natural passions; though his spirit craves for sympathy, he cuts himself off from all communion with others; to become a saint, he makes himself a voluntary pauper; he imposes upon himself absolute silence; he is dead while he lives. Now, contrast with this the married clergyman, as he may often be seen in happy England, in his modest home and amidst his family-his wife as a fruitful vine upon the walls of his house, and his children like olive branches round about his table. He aims at no perfection but such as may consist with the |