ying, is altogether
astonishing. They preserved to us the treasures of classical antiquity.
They discovered for us the germs of all our modern inventions. They
brought in from abroad arts and new knowledge; and while they taught men
to know that they had a common humanity, a common Father in heaven taught
them also to profit by each other's wisdom instead of remaining in
isolated ignorance. They, too, were the great witnesses against feudal
caste. With them was neither high-born nor low-born, rich nor poor:
worth was their only test; the meanest serf entering there might become
the lord of knights and vassals, the counsellor of kings and princes. Men
may talk of democracy--those old monasteries were the most democratic
institutions the world had ever till then seen. 'A man's a man for a'
that,' was not only talked of in them, but carried out in practice--only
not in anarchy, and as a cloak for licentiousness: but under those
safeguards of strict discipline, and almost military order, without which
men may call themselves free, and yet be really only slaves to their own
passions. Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, in those monasteries was
preserved the sacred fire of modern liberty, through those feudal
centuries when all the outside world was doing its best to trample it
out. Remember, as a single instance, that in the Abbot's lodging at Bury
St. Edmunds, the Magna Charta was drawn out, before being presented to
John at Runymede. I know what they became afterwards, better than most
do here; too well to defile my lips, or your ears, with tales too true.
They had done their work, and they went. Like all things born in time,
they died; and decayed in time; and the old order changed, giving place
to the new; and God fulfilled himself in many ways. But in them, too, he
fulfilled himself. They were the best things the world had seen; the
only method of Christianizing and civilizing semi-barbarous Europe. Like
all human plans and conceptions, they contained in themselves original
sin; idolatry, celibacy, inhuman fanaticism; these were their three roots
of bitterness; and when they bore the natural fruit of immorality, the
monasteries fell with a great and just destruction. But had not those
monasteries been good at first, and noble at first; had not the men in
them been better and more useful men than the men outside, do you think
they would have endured for centuries? They would not even have
established themselves