hinery weaving garments for the poor, or producing household comforts
to increase the happiness of the humblest man.

There is much that is out of joint, much to justify doleful prophecies,
in the social and religious conditions of the present age, but the
signs of the times are not all ominous. At all events, nothing would be
gained by a return to the monkish ideals of the past. The hope of the
world lies in the further development and completer realization of those
great principles of human freedom that distinguish this century from the
past. The history of monasticism clearly shows that the monasteries
could not minister to that development of liberty, truth and justice,
which constitute the indispensable condition of human happiness and
human progress. Unable to adjust themselves to the new age, unwilling to
welcome the new light, rejecting the doctrine of individual freedom, the
monks were forced to retire from the field.

So fell in England that institution which, for twelve centuries, had
exercised marvelous dominion over the spiritual and temporal interests
of the continent, and for eight hundred years had suffered or thrived on
English soil. "The day came, and that a drear winter day, when its last
mass was sung, its last censer waved, its last congregation bent in rapt
and lovely adoration before the altar." Its majestic and solemn ruins
proclaim its departed grandeur. Its deeds of mercy, its conflicts with
kings and bishops, its prayers and chants and penances, its virtues and
its vices, its trials and its victories, its wealth and its poverty, all
are gone. Silence and death keep united watch over cloister and tomb. We
should be ungrateful if we forgot its blessings; we should be untrue if,
ignoring its evils, we sought to bring back to life that which God has
laid in the sepulcher of the dead.

"Where pleasant was the spot for men to dwell,
Amid its fair broad lands the abbey lay,
Sheltering dark orgies that were shame to tell,
And cowled and barefoot beggars swarmed the way,
All in their convent weeds of black, and white, and gray.

From many a proud monastic pile, o'erthrown,
Fear-struck, the brooded inmates rushed and fled;
The web, that for a thousand years had grown
O'er prostrate Europe, in that day of dread
Crumbled and fell, as fire dissolves the flaxen thread."

--_Bryant_.

VIII

_CAUSES AND IDEALS OF MONASTICISM_

All forms of