every-day cares, the common duties, and the innocent delights of our social existence; he is a man among men; his sympathies go forth freely to all around him; he lives loving and beloved; now communing with the wife of his bosom; now prattling with his children; now visiting and holding intercourse with the poor; his religious duties are all free-will services; he is awake to every gentle voice, alive to each cheerful aspect of nature and to each beauty of art; he responds alike to every divine impulse and to every human feeling; he rejoices in gladness and thankfulness of heart for all God's goodness; he sanctifies every gift, every relation, every act, by the word of God and prayer; no chord is unstrung in his renewed spirit, but all blend together in harmonies as rich as David's lyre, and as varied as the vicissitudes of daily life; he lives the Christian, and dies the humble believing sinner, amid the tears of his beloved ones and the benedictions of his people.

Need we ask which of these two modes of life is the Christian? or which is the preferable? Heart and soul all Protestants will be in favour of the married minister's. He who will be wiser than his Maker is only presumptuously wise. He who will seek to become divine by ceasing to be human, will become at best a distorted prodigy. A monk is but a piece of truncated Humanity. Ambiguous as are some passages of Scripture, obscure and indistinct as the line of Christian duty sometimes appears, he who can discern things that differ will have no difficulty in discerning that self-adoring pride is the fountainspring of Monasticism, whether in the Heathen or in the Christian world. But, as he is a martyr who has the spirit of a martyr, so evangelical perfection consists in having the disposedness of mind which, even while participating in all the joys and sorrows of life, and deeply affected by them, prepares the man to renounce the one or endure the other at any moment in a cheerful compliance with the will of God, when the act is evidently seen to be for the glory of Christ.

There is yet another difference between the married clergy of the church of England and the unmarried clergy of the church of Rome. The celibate state of the latter makes them, wherever they are, conspirators against the rest of mankind, more attached to their Order than to their country, adherents to Rome under all governments, without one feeling left in their bosoms that can interfere with their exclusive allegiance to the Papacy. Living among us, but not of us,—valuing their privileges as citizens only for furthering their ends as churchmen,men in whom the heart of the husband and the feelings of the father never throb,-necessarily selfish from having none but themselves to care for,-teachers of duties which they cannot themselves practise, conversant through the confessional with all that is polluting and nought that is refining in human

nature, the priesthood of the church of Rome remains to this day a gloomy and loathsome monument of the triumph of Superstition over Religion and of perverted sentiment over pure Christianity.

Such being the wide gulf that separates between the Monastic system and Evangelical Christianity-such the difference in their origin, their principles, their tendencies, and their fruits, what can account for the unbounded admiration with which the monastic life is viewed by the Count de Montalembert? The Count, though Papist he be, is an ardent lover of freedom. He has lately signalized himself in the cause of Poland, where the Latin, and not the Greek, church (though this, of course, has nothing to do with it) is the national faith. He would have liberty established all over the world; and what he maintains is, that never was there such true freedom among people as in the middle ages, when the Romish church reigned sole and supreme. His proof of it is the free discussion of all questions then permitted, and the free comments allowed upon persons and things, of which the Satires written by the different Orders of monks one upon another are evidence. There is partial truth in this, but it is not the whole truth. The Church of Rome allowed every subject to be discussed, except her own pretensions, and upon the one condition, that her own authority was not called in question. The freedom then enjoyed, therefore, was just that sort of chained freedom which Dr. Arnold, in his Lectures on Modern History, has so truly described: "To a man not in earnest the principle of church authority is a very endurable shackle. He does homage to it once for all, and is then free." This is a sort of freedom which no Protestant would value. For it is the freedom only of a squirrel in a cage, going for ever round and round in a curriculum of rotatory action and of fancied progress within its own moving yet stationary prison-house, insensible to the narrowness of the world in which it is cooped up.

There was one respect, however, in which, beyond doubt, the monks, in their earlier days, were the friends and defenders of freedom. They stepped in between the barbarian conquerors of Southern Europe and their subjects; they restrained them from violence; they assuaged the savageness of incivilized warfare; they pleaded for the equality of all men in the sight of Heaven; and so checked the wantonness of tyranny, and the excesses of autocratic power. They also, in the middle ages, curbed the too often arbitrary domination of feudal chiefs over their vassals, by taking the part of the weak against the strong; upheld municipal independence; withstood usurpation in temporal authorities; asserted the rights of local govern

"They drew back from no enquiry, from no discussion; they gloried in placing boldness on a level with faith." (Vol. ii. p. 396.)

ment for the people; and in this way, we admit, we owe many of the privileges which we enjoy to this day, to the dogged resistance offered to encroachments on liberty by those corporate defenders of freedom-the monks of the West.

We can hardly wonder, then, that the Count de Montalembert, who has felt in his own person the iron pressure of the absolute despotism that now holds sway over France, where even to publish an independent opinion is a crime, and where no free discussion is allowed, should sigh after the freedom enjoyed by the members of his own, church in the middle ages, and should contemplate with regret the decadence of monastic institutions which were the great bulwarks of that freedom. There is something touching-more touching, perhaps, than true-in the lamentations which he pours forth over this supposed great general calamity-over its completeness and hopelessness, and in the description which he gives of the state of things that has supervened. The following is one of the most powerful passages in his work:

"Of all the human institutions which have been assailed or overthrown by revolution, something has always endured. Monarchy, although weakened and shaken, has proved that it can reassume its ascendancy. Nobility, although everywhere, except in England, annulled and degraded, still exists amongst us. Industrial and mer

cantile wealth has never been more powerful. The ancient monastic orders alone have been condemned to perish without return. The only one of all the institutions of the past which has been totally spoiled and annihilated, is the most useful and the most legitimate of all-the only one which never had an abuse of strength, or conquest of violence, to reproach itself with,-but which all the violences and tyrannies have joined hands to annihilate by the vilest of aggressions, that which kills in order to rob." (Vol. i. pp. 165, 166.)

If we are to believe the noble author, there never was a more felicitous condition upon earth than the state of things in the middle ages-generally spoken of as the "dark ages. When he touches upon this, he glows into eloquence of a high order. Here is his description of that period::

"Religion governed all; but she stifled nothing. She was not banished into a corner of society, immured within the enclosure of her own temples, or of individual conscience. On the contrary, she was invited to animate, enlighten, and penetrate everything with the spirit of life. . . . The memory of Redemption, of that debt contracted towards God by the race which was redeemed on Calvary, mingled with everything, and was to be found in all institutions, in all monuments, and at certain moments, in all hearts. The victory of charity over selfishness, of humility over pride, of spirit over flesh, of all that is elevated in our nature over all the ignoble and impure elements included in it, was as frequent as human weakness permitted. That victory is never complete here below; but we can affirm without fear that it never was approached so closely, since the first great defi

ance thrown down, by the establishment of Christianity, to the triumph of evil in the world, never, perhaps, has the empire of the devil been so much shaken and contested." (pp. 207, 208.)

This is a zealous Romanist's view, it must be remembered, of the spiritual triumphs, the beneficence, and all pervading Christian principles of his own church, when the sacerdotal power was supreme, when her despotism was unquestioned, and when the Monkish Orders were the petty monarchs of society under the headship of the supreme Pontiff. It would be easy to set in contrast to this (we have already done so in part) the other side of the picture, as sketched even by illustrious members of the Romish communion, living in those same middle ages. Baronius himself might be called in to fill up the sketch. But we have not space. Nor is it needful. Monasticism has become a thing of the past. It is now fast disappearing from the face of Europe. Though its dying wick flickers up here and there, it is shorn both of its splendours and its power. The monks were in their day the reserve force of the Church of Rome. They saved her in many a critical moment, when her hold upon mankind had declined, and her overthrow seemed inevitable. But great as were their services, not to Christianity, but to the reigning Church, we cannot contemplate these Orders with the complacency with which the Count de Montalembert views them. Still less can we view the condition of things that existed in the middle ages as the beau ideal of healthy Christian life. Evils which we now can hardly realize, even in conception, were then rampant; and though there was an exhibition of stern vigour in the monks, which had its effect even upon civilians in that age, it is impossible not to think such a picture as the following overdrawn:

"All was war, dangers and tempests in the Church as in the State; but all was likewise strong, robust, and vivacious; everything bore the impression of strife and life. On one side faith-a faith sincere, naïve, simple and vigorous, without hypocrisy, as without insolence; neither servile nor narrow-minded; exhibiting every day the imposing spectacle of strength in humility; on the other, institutions militant and manful, which, amid a thousand defects, had the admirable virtue of creating men, not valets or pious eunuchs, and which, one and all, ordained these men to action, to sacrifice, and to continual exertions." (p. 213.)

What, it is evident, has imposed most powerfully upon the imagination of the Count de Montalembert, was the energy of purpose, the decision of self-denial, the dauntlessness of courage, which the monks everywhere exhibited in carrying out their self-chosen mission. "I do not hesitate to affirm," he says, "that the monks, the true monks of the great ages of the Church, are the representatives of manhood under its most pure and most energetic form-of manhood intellectual and moral-of

manhood, in some manner condensed by celibacy, protesting against all vulgarity and baseness, condemning itself to efforts more great, sustained, and profound, than are excited by any worldly career; and by this means making of earth only a stepping-stone to heaven, and of life but a long series of victories." (p. 27.)

Doubtless there was something morally grand in the victories which the good among the monks achieved over themselves, and in the fearless boldness with which they went to the task of subduing others; neither shrinking from pain nor trembling at power. In this they contrast favourably with our more feeble temporizing age, when the advice, "Spare thyself," is much more frequently acted on than "Deny thyself." We are a prudent generation. Our first thought is, how to act so as to bring no reproach, suffering, or loss upon ourselves. The god of our worship is success. Hence there is too much truth in this observation of our author: "We live in an age of concessions, of failures, of base compliances with everything that has the appearance of strength. Fear is our Queen." (p. 227.) The monks, on the contrary, achieved self-conquest by giving up everything of their own from the outset of their career. This girded them with a high moral power for other difficult achievements. To him who feels he has nothing to lose, it is comparatively easy to dare. There was a moral discipline, beyond question, in the monastic institute, which operated with tonic force to create a robust, hardy, dauntless character. The monastery was at once a school of originality and a school of energy. Within it were developed those qualities in Religionists which now make men great in the field of battle, and win lasting renown for our Nelsons and our Wellingtons. Much of this we have lost under the more effeminate regime of our day; and the distinctive character of our age, in consequence, is weakness, and not strength; timidity, not boldness; indecision, not daring; self-saving, and not self-sacrificing. On this point we go to some extent with the Count de Montalembert when he says, "I remain sadly impressed by the spectacle of the debasement, feebleness, and growing impotence of the individual man of modern society. Does not this stupid and servile apotheosis of the wisdom and power of the masses menace us with the extinction at once of every personal initiative, and of all strong originality, and with the annihilation at the same time of all the proud susceptibilities of the soul, and of the forces of public life?" (p. 221.) It cannot, we think, be denied, that a progressive empire of mediocrity marks our day, and threatens to become universal, if it be not stayed by the revival, in individuals, of high heroic christian principle.

The thing which, perhaps, above all others, stamps the religious spirit of our age in our own country, is the state of