the great work of Monachism. We have annihilated Monasticism, and we glory in its destruction; but what means have we provided in its room to carry on the unceasing supplications of the Church? And yet though lowered to such a laborious circle of industrious piety, and the comparatively gloomy pursuits of self-discipline, nothing could be possibly more alien from the fact than to imagine the monk either a gloomy or joyless person. The very names they have given to their homes are in proof of this, a long list of which is given (i. 67). What tender and gracious charities ruled there between brother and brother, may be illustrated from what is written in the life of Anselm; how Osborn, jealous of Anselm's productions-though himself but a young brother was moved to hatred against Anselm, and 'demonstrated it violently.'

'Anselm devoted himself to this young man. Gained upon him by degrees by his indulgences, traced for him the path of austerities, made him a saint, watched him night and day during his last sickness, and received his last sigh. Afterwards he still continued to love the soul of him who had been his enemy; and not content with saying mass for him every day during a year, he hastened from monastery to monastery solicting others to join him. We see it unceasingly specified among the qualities of the most pious abbots and exemplary monks that they were gay, joyous, amusing, loving to laugh. These expressions overflow above all from the pen of Orderic Vital, who speaking of himself in his long and precious history, tells us, "I have borne, for forty-two years, with happiness, the sweet yoke of the Lord." S. Anselm, that great and irreproachable monk, certainly knew what he said, when he thus challenged the secular clergy of his time, "You, who believe that it is easier to live religiously under the habit of a priest than to bear the burden of monastic life, behold and see with what lightness that burden is borne by Christians of each sex, of every age, and condition, who fill the entire world with their spiritual joy.” —Vol. iii. pp. 83–90.

In another respect, the monastic institute has benefited the poor-albeit indirectly. At this age it is one of the characteristics of benevolence, to devise treats and 'outs' for the overworked children of toil. This, like most else, we are overdoing and spoiling. But, in the days of the monks, all classes but the monks were pervaded more or less with a sense of the insecurity and misery of the world. Whatever joy and festal feeling, reached in those days of evil the poor man's lot, was furnished through the zeal and humanity of the monks. 'He who is ignorant of their services, has only a narrow and vulgar idea of virtue.' Our author owns, however, that the monks relaxed the claims of duty and acknowledges that their primitive strength was lamentably lessened by the abuses of the Commende. He argues that the imputed indolence of the monks, was but the leisure of the wealthy; and as regards the charge of riches, he passionately argues :

:

They were too rich! Yes, certainly, there were communities of extreme opulence, and this was one great cause of decay and corruption; I admit it freely. The Church, remaining faithful to the intentions of the founders, had there a legitimate cause of intervention for the better division and more useful employment of monastic wealth. But was this a reason for its appropriation to the profit of the State? No; a thousand times, no! And who can venture to raise such a complaint from the midst of modern society, in which wealth henceforward takes the only distinction and sole evidence of social importance, has naturally become the object of covetousness less restrained, and more rapacious desire than at any other epoch? Too rich! but what human authority is entitled to fix the limit at which excessive wealth commences, or to trace boundaries to property legitimately acquired? It is religion alone which can distinguish here the necessary from the superfluous, and determine on a fit destination for that superfluity; and yet, by a revolting wickedness, it is against herself only, against the sacred weakness of the Church, that men have systematically violated the rights of property. The Church alone had a right to say that the monks had too much wealth; we can only say that they were rich; and we can justify their fortune in two words, by its origin and its employment.'-Vol. i. p. 114.

Our author refuses to throw a veil over the corruptions of the religious orders, feeling, that by doing so, he would make it responsible for him to explain how all the Catholic grandeur could have been so suddenly swept away. He will not speak wickedly for God. But, in the words of the great monk Lacordaire, 'abuses prove nothing against any institution; and if it is necessary to destroy everything that has been subject to abuse,—that 'is to say, of things good in themselves, but corrupted by the 'liberty of man-God Himself ought to be seized on His inac'cessible throne, where, too often we have seated our own passions ' and errors by His side.' Even Voltaire can be quoted (i. 131 n.) in avowing that there is no monastery that does not contain 'admirable souls who do honour to human nature. It is certain 'that secular life has always been more vicious.' The great external cause of the decline in monastical institutions, is to be found in the Commende already referred to, which enabled those, not monks, or unmarried laymen, to hold the greater part of the revenues of a monastery, with the title of Abbot. As to revelations of the moral decay of houses, our author mentions indeed, the weak libertinage of Boccaccio,' but he does not do himself and his subject the justice to say whether or no the Italian writer has misrepresented and slandered the monasteries of Italy. No remedy has been found for the terrible corruption which has made so many living institutes' spiritual corpses.' A fair effort -made under Louis XIV.-might have been successful, but it was not made, though partially attempted. We seek in vain in the annals of the Church, since the Council of Trent, for a great and energetic effort against the evil, or even for a generous and reasonable appeal :

"That the bishops, and even the greatest among them, should have ended by remaining passive witnesses of so many scandals, may be, if not justified, at least explained, by the abuse of exemptions, which had disarmed and set them aside from all intervention in the life of communities. But how shall we explain, that, among so many good popes, not one was found to refuse the bulls which delivered the honour and possessions of the most celebrated monasteries to persons notoriously unworthy, such as Bussy d'Amboise, and the Abbé Dubois ? How shall we explain that all of them have left that purulent plague to eat deeper and deeper until the day of irremediable ruin?'—Vol. i. p. 155.

How, indeed? There might as well have been, so far, no infallible Pontiff at all. Or shall we answer the inquiry by referring to the case of Luther, and concluding that it was the same contemptuous indifference in a like case, to the cry for Reformation? An indifference arising from the inability of the Pontiff, by reason of his infallibility ever to repent? Quidquid delirant reges,' the monks were chastised. But they have been avenged. Not to speak of the Reformation, or the fact, that Henry VIII., who ascended the throne the richest monarch of his age,-after all the Church treasure had been absorbed,-died the poorest, let us look to a later age. The son of Maria Theresa suppressed, in his states, 124 monasteries. The name of his empire has been extinguished, and his dominions have been thrice bankrupt since then. Between 1830 and 1835, 3,000 monasteries 'disappeared from the soil of Europe.' The number which Queen Christina annihilated in Spain, has not yet been estimated. Two hundred were extinguished in Poland. The war against monasteries begun by kings soon turned against them. The bodies of the Cid, of Alfred the Great, of James IV. of Scotland, have all been removed or dishonoured. The convent-sheltered graves of Laura, Heloise, Ximena, and Inez de Castro, have been all profaned. Then let us glance at the resulting changes. Five hundred convicts at Clairvaux replace the five hundred monks of Bernard; Fontevrault and S. Michael are houses of detention. Eysse, Beaulieu, Cadillac, Loos, are also central prisons. Cluny, 'the most illustrious monastery of Christendom, the church, '-which was the largest in Europe,-yielding in dimensions only to S. Peter's of Rome,' Cambrom, and a dozen others, are all stables. A china factory occupies the site of the Chartreuse, of Seville, and swine are installed by German Lutherans in the cells of Noth-gottes, and by French Catholics, under the admirable sculptures of the cloister of Cadouin' (i. 177.)

'I stood in Grenada, one day, in the Albaycin, at the gate of the Convent of Santa Isabel la Real, founded by Isabella the Catholic, in memory of her conquests, still occupied by its noble inhabitants, but condemned to selfextinction, the dictatorship of Espartero having interdicted them, as well as all the other convents in Spain from receiving novices. A woman approached and explained to me that savage interdict; then, extending her hands towards the condemned convent, and flashing on it one of those burning glances which

cannot be forgotten, she exclaimed, with the accent of a Roman and the ardour of a Spaniard, these two words, Suma tirania! She was right; tyranny has invented nothing more oppressive than this stifling of devotion, chastity, and charity in the human soul. Let us believe, for the honour of the human species, that posterity will repeat that sentence, and define by the two words of the indignant Spanish woman, the policy and justice of these comedians of liberty, when they shall stand finally unmasked before its eyes. Besides, the Son of God has already pronounced their sentence, "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, bypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in."-Vol. i. p. 192.

Count Montalembert's chapter on the false and true Middle Age is particularly attractive. The ordinary definition of the Middle Age is from the taking of Old Rome by the Goths, to the taking of New Rome by the Ottomans, or the Karáẞaois of Charles VIII. on Naples. This epoch is usually divided into two equal parts, and the earlier period up to the coronation of Charlemagne really does deserve the somewhat vague but common designation of the Dark Ages. The remaining part of mediæval history our author would style the Middle Age proper, and the succeeding epoch he entitles the ancien regime." He complains of the confusion which ignorance on the one side, and the policy of absolutism on the other, 'has introduced between phases of history totally different and even hostile to each other' (i. 195). It is important,' exclaims our author, 'to free the true Middle Ages, in their Catholic splendour, from all affinity with the 'theory and practice of that renewed old pagan despotism which 'still here and there contends with modern liberty' (i. 125). He owns that the assertion of this important declaration-'a work so indispensable to the honour and enfranchisement of Catho'licism' has been carried out by Protestants-in no case by that clergy of France so interested in the subject: and the question has been exhaustively disposed of by Guizot, Müller, Voigt, Leo, and the two Menzels. There are two views of the Church in the Middle Age proper: the one represents her as the Land of Promise indeed, always triumphant, protected, and prosperous, governed by kings and nobles piously kneeling before the priests; and by a devout, silent, and docile crowd, tranquilly stretched out under the crook of their pastors, to sleep in the shade under the double authority of the inviolably ' respected throne and altar.' But Count Montalembert is too true an historian and too candid a man to accept this view of the age. He depicts the time as one of the greatest disturbance, full of revolution, yet strong and vivacious, and Christian heroes appear all through more as athletes than men.

Our author properly begins his work with the peace of the Church; and it is really quite refreshing to find the candour

6

which he has exhibited at the outset, carried out unflinchingly through his work.' He is not afraid to speak of the sudden, mysterious, and absolute failure of the Church on her high mission; but the causes he finds for this precocious decay are the spread of heresy and the diffusion of politics in the Church. To enable the Church to save society, a new element was necessary to the world, and a new force to the Church.' The Roman world without the barbarians was an abyss of corruption and servitude; and the barbarised world was chaos without the monks. By the pity of God, the restorative element was fully constituted before the destruction arrived; the close of the third century may be fixed ou as the date of the regular formation of the monastic order; nor is it without its own spiritual significance that Egypt for a third time should lend a shelter and a secure retreat to the nascent hopes of the Israel of God. Our author, as in duty bound, briefly narrates the lives of Paul, Antony, Pacome, the two Ammons, the two Macarii; and the visit of Athanasius to the Thebaid. We can but glance at their contents. The monastic institutions of Sinai, Syria, Cyprus, Mesopotamia are briefly noticed as prefatory to the introduction of the chief actor, S. Basil. Up to this time these devotees lived 'in groups, under the sway of a discipline always severe, but 'changeable and varied, according to the climates and individual instincts. This did not sufficiently preserve zeal from excess, nor weakness from scandalous falls.' It was reserved for S. Basil, in the middle of the fourth century, to give a formal constitution to the monks of the East :

'Drawn out in the form of answers to 203 different questions upon the obligations of the solitary life, and upon the meaning of the most important texts of Holy Scripture, and partly adapted to communities of both sexes, it bore throughout the stamp of the good sense and moderation which characterised its author. It insisted upon the dangers of absolute solitude for humility and charity, upon the necessity of much obedience, upon the abnegation of all personal property, as of all individual inclination, and, above all, upon the perpetual duty of labour.'-Vol. i. p. 351.

As we shall come presently to two other rules, we have been the more careful to quote this of S. Basil. The societies formed under it declined with the declining empire. The religious were exposed to the twofold evil of courtierism and theological

1 On the subject of Liberius, our author writes with singular grace and courage: Liberius, according to the common opinion, yielded, after a noble resistance, to the torments of exile: he sacrificed not the truth itself, but the intrepid defender of the truth, Athanasius. He recovered himself, and pledged the infallible authority of his see to no error,' &c. (i. 258). We ask, What then was this fall? How could he, under the admitted circumstances, sacrifice Athanasius and not the truth? Was he the only pontiff at whose name we see a shadow and cloud glide across that column of light which guides the observations of every Catholic when he plunges into the obscurity of history?'