ver
by an abbess chosen for her piety and strength of mind, filled with
women who were not loath to forsake the pleasures of the world for the
love of peace and divine contemplation. From the Eternal City where
Gregory was reviving in religious guise that power which for so many
centuries had dominated the world, and where alone was retained what
remained of a departed civilization, to Streonshealh where Hild,
daughter of barbaric chiefs, reared her abbey on the summit of the dark
cliffs of Whitby, looking out over the gloom of the Northern Sea, these
convents represented what was then considered as the acme of feminine
attainment.

That feminine monasticism had its uses and conferred its benefits it
would be an absurdity to deny. Despite the falsity of the unnatural
moral theory which supplied too largely its motive, monasticism was an
outward and visible sign of that human evolution which makes for
progress. The selfishness of its spiritual aims was in accord with the
strenuous individualism of that new age; its dualistic theory of nature
was at least a revolt from the brutal animalism of the day. Moreover, it
furnished the only opportunity that human life then afforded for calm
and concentrated reflection on any subject save eating, breeding, and
killing. The monastery was the bridge by which the salvage from the
dissolution of ancient civilization was carried over the Dark Ages to
the Renaissance.

When we seek for the peculiar benefits monasticism provided for women,
they are found to be two. The universally recognized sanctity of the
cloister provided, in an age of exceeding brutality, a sanctuary where
woman might take refuge, and where something at least of the
spirituality of her nature might be neither outraged nor obliterated. It
may be that, after all unfavorable judgments have been passed, if it had
not been for the veneration of cloistered virginity, in so rude an age
the world might have forgotten what modesty and purity are. Also, it is
not favorable to the highest development of womanhood to be absolutely
restricted to the one vocation of marriage. If, to-day, women are not
better wives, they surely are more self-respecting for the fact that
there is a possibility of their being independent and yet remain
unmarried. What business now does for woman, in the olden times was done
by the female monastery: it provided examples of the sex, who were
glorious, and yet unmarried. The woman crossed in love, or