seful or elevated nature could
possibly emanate. They are too apt to suppose that the human intellect
must be altogether weak and impotent when confined within such narrow
limits; but truth and knowledge can exist even in the dark cells of a
gloomy cloister, and inspire the soul with a fire that can shed a light
far beyond its narrow precincts. Indeed, I scarce know whether to
regret, as some appear to do, that the literature and learning of those
rude times was preserved and fostered by the Christian church; it is
said, that their strict devotion and religious zeal prompted them to
disregard all things but a knowledge of those divine, but such is not the
case; at least, I have not found it so; it is true, as churchmen, they
were principally devoted to the study of divine and ecclesiastical lore;
but it is also certain that in that capacity they gradually infused the
mild spirit of their Master among the darkened society over which they
presided, and among whom they shone as beacons of light in a dreary
desert. But the church did more than this. She preserved to posterity the
profane learnings of Old Greece and Rome; copied it, multiplied it, and
spread it. She recorded to after generations in plain, simple language,
the ecclesiastical and civil events of the past, for it is from the terse
chronicles of the monkish churchmen that we learn now the history of what
happened then. Much as we may dislike the monastic system, the cold,
heartless, gloomy ascetic atmosphere of the cloister, and much as we may
deplore the mental dissipation of man's best attributes, which the system
of those old monks engendered, we must exercise a cool and impartial
judgment, and remember that what now would be intolerable and monstrously
inconsistent with our present state of intellectuality, might at some
remote period, in the ages of darkness and comparative barbarism, have
had its virtues and beneficial influences. As for myself, it would be
difficult to convince me, with all those fine relics of their deeds
before me, those beauteous fanes dedicated to piety and God, those
libraries so crowded with their vellum tomes, so gorgeously adorned, and
the abundant evidence which history bears to their known charity and
hospitable love, that these monks and their system was a scheme of dismal
barbarism; it may be so, but my reading has taught me different; but, on
the other hand, although the monks possessed many excellent qualities,
being the encou