the plow in the furrow, and thwarted the
devices of the king. He has befriended the poor, and imposed penance
upon princes. He has imitated the poverty and purity of Jesus, and aped
the pomp and vice of kings. He has dwelt solitary on cold mountains,
subsisting on bread, roots and water, and he has surrounded himself with
menials ready to gratify every luxurious wish, amid the splendor of
palatial cloisters. Still there are new types and phases of monasticism
yet to appear. The monk has other tasks to undertake, for the world is
not yet sufficiently wearied of his presence to destroy his cloister and
banish him from the land.

V

_THE MENDICANT FRIARS_

Abraham Lincoln only applied a general principle to a specific case when
he said, "This nation cannot long endure half slave and half free."
Glaring inconsistencies between faith and practice will eventually
destroy any institution, however lofty its ideal or noble its
foundation. God suffers long and is kind, but His forbearance is not
limitless. Monasticism, as has been shown, was never free from serious
inconsistency, from moral dualism. But the power of reform prolonged its
existence. It was constantly producing fresh models of its ancient
ideals. It had a hidden reserve-force from which it supplied shining
examples of a living faith and a self-denying love, just at the time
when it seemed as if the system was about to perish forever. When these
fresh exhibitions of monastic fidelity likewise became tarnished, when
men had tired of them and predicted the speedy collapse of the
institution, forth from the cloister came another body of monkish
recruits, to convince the world that monasticism was not dead; that it
did not intend to die; that it was mightier than all its enemies. The
day came, however, when the world lost its confidence in an institution
which required such constant reforming to keep it pure, which demanded
so much cleansing to keep it clean. Ideals that could so quickly lose
their influence for good came to be looked upon with suspicion.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century we are confronted by the
anomaly of a church grossly corrupt but widely obeyed. She is nearing
the pinnacle of her power and the zenith of her glory, although the
parochial clergy have sunk into vice and incapacity, and the monks, as a
class, are lazy, ignorant and notoriously corrupt. Two things,
especially, command the attention,--first, the immorality and laxity of