ooted into the heart of mankind.

Nature never half does her work. She goes over it, and over it, to make
assurance sure, and makes good her ground with wearying repetition. A
single section of a short paper is but a small space to enter on so vast
an enterprise; nevertheless, a few very general words shall be ventured
as a suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may possibly
have meant.

First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to the world,
whatever form the spirit of the world assumes, the ideals of
Christianity will of course be their opposite; as one verges into one
extreme, the other will verge into the contrary. In those rough times
the law was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong animal heart
which guided it, were the excellences which the world rewarded; and
monasticism, therefore, in its position of protest, would be the
destruction and abnegation of the animal nature. The war hero in the
battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis of the
fleshly man--the saint in the desert of the spiritual.

But this interpretation is slight, imperfect, and if true at all only
partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not contradictories; they
are the complements in the perfect character; and in the middle ages, as
in all ages of genuine earnestness, they interfused and penetrated each
other. There were warrior saints and saintly warriors; and those grand
old figures which sleep cross-legged in the cathedral aisles were
something higher than only one more form of the beast of prey.
Monasticism represented something more positive than a protest against
the world. We believe it to have been the realisation of the infinite
loveliness and beauty of personal purity.

In the earlier civilisation, the Greeks, however genuine their reverence
for the gods, do not seem to have supposed any part of their duty to the
gods to consist in keeping their bodies untainted. Exquisite as was
their sense of beauty, of beauty of mind as well as beauty of form, with
all their loftiness and their nobleness, with their ready love of moral
excellence when manifested, as fortitude, or devotion to liberty and to
home, they had little or no idea of what we mean by morality. With a few
rare exceptions, pollution, too detestable to be even named among
ourselves, was of familiar and daily occurrence among their greatest
men; was no reproach to philosopher or to statesman; and was not
supposed to be