on their own
foundation. As soon as men begin to be really men, the desire of
corporate life springs up in them. They must unite; they must organize
themselves. If they possess duties, they must be duties to their fellow-
men; if they possess virtues and graces, they must mix with their fellow-
men in order to exercise them.

The solitaries of the Thebaid found that they became selfish wild beasts,
or went mad, if they remained alone; and they formed themselves into
lauras, 'lanes' of huts, convents, under a common abbot or father. The
evangelical converts of the last century formed themselves into powerful
and highly organized sects. The middle-age monasteries organized
themselves into highly artificial communities round some sacred spot,
generally under the supposed protection of some saint or martyr, whose
bones lay there. Each method was good, though not the highest. None of
them rises to the idea of a people, having one national life, under one
monarch, the representative to each and all of that national life, and
the dispenser and executor of its laws. Indeed, the artificial
organization, whether monastic or sectarian, may become so strong as to
interfere with national life, and make men forget their real duty to
their king and country, in their self-imposed duty to the sect or order
to which they belong. The monastic organization indeed had to die, in
many countries, in order that national life might develop itself; and the
dissolution of the monasteries marks the birth of an united and powerful
England. They or Britain must have died. An imperium in imperio--much
more many separate imperia--was an element of national weakness, which
might be allowed in times of peace and safety, but not in times of
convulsion and of danger.

You may ask, however, how these monasteries became so powerful, if they
were merely refuges for the weak? Even if they were (and they were) the
homes of an equal justice and order, mercy and beneficence, which had few
or no standing-places outside their walls, still, how, if governed by
weak men, could they survive in the great battle of life? The sheep
would have but a poor life of it, if they set up hurdles against the
wolves, and agreed at all events not to eat each other.

The answer is, that the monasteries were not altogether tenanted by
incapables. The same causes which brought the low-born into the
monasteries, brought the high-born, many of the very highest. The sa