and devotional exercises and religious improvement, and
the other half to labors in the fields, or in painting or musical
composition. So far as we know, the monks lived in great harmony, and
were obedient to the commands of their superiors. They had a common
object to live for, and had few differences in opinion on any subject.
They did not enjoy a high life, but it was free from distracting
pleasures. They affected great humility, with which spiritual pride was
mingled,--not the arrogant pride of the dialectician, but the
self-satisfied pride of the devotee. There was no religious hatred,
except towards Turks and Saracens. The monk, in his narrowness and
ignorance, may be repulsive to an enlightened age: he was not repulsive
to his own, for he was not behind it either in his ideas or in his
habits of life. In fact, the more repulsive the monk of the dark ages
is to this generation, the more venerated he was by bishops and barons
seven hundred years ago; which fact leads us to infer that the
degenerate monk might be to us most interesting when he was most
condemned by the reformers of his day, since he was more humane, genial,
and free than his brethren, chained to the rigid discipline of his
convent. Even a Friar Tuck is not so repulsive to us as an unsocial,
austere, narrow-minded, and ignorant fanatic of the eleventh century.

But the monks were not to remain forever imprisoned in the castles of
ignorance and despair. With the opening of the twelfth century light
began to dawn upon the human mind. The intellectual monk, long
accustomed to devout meditations, began to speculate on those subjects
which had occupied his thoughts,--on God and His attributes, on the
nature and penalty of sin, on redemption, on the Saviour, on the power
of the will to resist evil, and other questions that had agitated the
early Fathers of the Church. Then arose such men as Erigena, Roscelin,
Berenger, Lanfranc, Anselm, Bernard, and others,--all more or less
orthodox, but inquiring and intellectual. It was within the walls of the
cloister that the awakening began and the first impulse was given to
learning and philosophy. The abbey of Bec, in Normandy, was the most
distinguished of new intellectual centres, while Clairvaux and other
princely abbeys had inmates as distinguished for meditative habits as
for luxury and pride.

It was at this period, when the convents of Europe rejoiced in ample
possessions, and their churches rivalled cathe