ment. The
fact is, that their rule of life, from the earliest to the latest,--from
that of St. Benedict of Casino, 'father of all monks,' to that of Loyola
the Jesuit, was pitched not too low, but too high. It was an ideal
which, for good or for evil, could only be carried out by new converts,
by people in a state of high religious excitement, and therefore the
history of the monastic orders is just that of the protestant sects. We
hear of continual fallings off from their first purity; of continual
excitements, revivals, and startings of new orders, which hoped to
realize the perfection which the old orders could not. You must bear
this in mind, as you read mediaeval history. You will be puzzled to know
why continual new rules and new orders sprung up. They were so many
revivals, so many purist attempts at new sects. You will see this very
clearly in the three great revivals which exercised such enormous
influence on the history of the 13th, the 16th and the 17th centuries,--I
mean the rise first of the Franciscans and Dominicans, next of the
Jesuits, and lastly of the Port Royalists. They each professed to
restore monachism to what it had been at first; to realize the unnatural
and impossible ideal.

Another serious fault of these monasteries may be traced to their
artificial celibate system. I mean their avarice. Only one generation
after St. Sturmi, Charlemagne had to make indignant laws against Abbots
who tried to get into their hands the property of everybody around them:
but in vain. The Abbots became more and more the great landholders, till
their power was intolerable. The reasons are simple enough. An abbey
had no children between whom to divide its wealth, and therefore more
land was always flowing in and concentrating, and never breaking up
again; while almost every Abbot left his personalities, all his private
savings and purchases, to his successor.

Then again, in an unhappy hour, they discovered that the easiest way of
getting rich was by persuading sinners, and weak persons, to secure the
safety of their souls by leaving land to the Church, in return for the
prayers and masses of monks; and that shameful mine of wealth was worked
by them for centuries, in spite of statutes of mortmain, and other checks
which the civil power laid on them, very often by most detestable means.
One is shocked to find good men lending themselves to such base tricks:
but we must recollect, that there has always