at all. They would soon, in those stormy times,
have been swept off the face of the earth. Ill used they often were,
plundered and burnt down. But men found that they were good. Their own
plunderers found that they could not do without them; and repented, and
humbled themselves, and built them up again, to be centres of justice and
mercy and peace, amid the wild weltering sea of war and misery. For all
things endure, even for a generation, only by virtue of the good which is
in them. By the Spirit of God in them they live, as do all created
things; and when he taketh away their breath they die, and return again
to their dust.

And what was the original sin of them? We can hardly say that it was
their superstitious and partially false creed: because that they held in
common with all Europe. It was rather that they had identified
themselves with, and tried to realize on earth, one of the worst
falsehoods of that creed--celibacy. Not being founded on the true and
only ground of all society, family life, they were merely artificial and
self-willed arrangements of man's invention, which could not develop to
any higher form. And when the sanctity of marriage was revindicated at
the Reformation, the monasteries, having identified themselves with
celibacy, naturally fell. They could not partake in the Reformation
movement, and rise with it into some higher form of life, as the laity
outside did. I say, they were altogether artificial things. The Abbot
might be called the Abba, Father, of his monks: but he was not their
father--just as when young ladies now play at being nuns, they call their
superior, Mother: but all the calling in the world will not make that
sacred name a fact and a reality, as they too often find out.

And celibacy brought serious evils from the first. It induced an
excited, hysterical tone of mind, which is most remarkable in the best
men; violent, querulous, suspicious, irritable, credulous, visionary; at
best more womanly than manly; alternately in tears and in raptures. You
never get in their writings anything of that manly calmness, which we so
deservedly honour, and at which we all aim for ourselves. They are
bombastic; excited; perpetually mistaking virulence for strength, putting
us in mind for ever of the allocutions of the Popes. Read the writings
of one of the best of monks, and of men, who ever lived, the great St.
Bernard, and you will be painfully struck by this hysterical ele