the
ground. The visionaries are the only practical men, as in that
extraordinary thing, the monastery, which was, in many ways, to be the
key of our history. The time was to come when it was to be rooted out of
our country with a curious and careful violence; and the modern English
reader has therefore a very feeble idea of it and hence of the ages in
which it worked. Even in these pages a word or two about its primary
nature is therefore quite indispensable.

In the tremendous testament of our religion there are present certain
ideals that seem wilder than impieties, which have in later times
produced wild sects professing an almost inhuman perfection on certain
points; as in the Quakers who renounce the right of self-defence, or the
Communists who refuse any personal possessions. Rightly or wrongly, the
Christian Church had from the first dealt with these visions as being
special spiritual adventures which were to the adventurous. She
reconciled them with natural human life by calling them specially good,
without admitting that the neglect of them was necessarily bad. She took
the view that it takes all sorts to make a world, even the religious
world; and used the man who chose to go without arms, family, or
property as a sort of exception that proved the rule. Now the
interesting fact is that he really did prove it. This madman who would
not mind his own business becomes the business man of the age. The very
word "monk" is a revolution, for it means solitude and came to mean
community--one might call it sociability. What happened was that this
communal life became a sort of reserve and refuge behind the individual
life; a hospital for every kind of hospitality. We shall see later how
this same function of the common life was given to the common land. It
is hard to find an image for it in individualist times; but in private
life we most of us know the friend of the family who helps it by being
outside, like a fairy godmother. It is not merely flippant to say that
monks and nuns stood to mankind as a sort of sanctified league of aunts
and uncles. It is a commonplace that they did everything that nobody
else would do; that the abbeys kept the world's diary, faced the plagues
of all flesh, taught the first technical arts, preserved the pagan
literature, and above all, by a perpetual patchwork of charity, kept the
poor from the most distant sight of their modern despair. We still find
it necessary to have a reserve of ph