al
is, perhaps, on the whole, the most magnificent
creation which the mind of man has as yet thrown out
of itself. If there be any such thing as a philosophy
of history, real or possible, it is in virtue of there being
certain progressive organizing laws in which the fretful
lives of each of us are gathered into and subordinated in
some larger unity. Thus age is linked on to age, as we
are moving forward, with an horizon for ever expanding
and advancing. And if this is true, the magnitude of
any human phenomenon is a criterion of its importance,
and definite forms of thought working through long
historic periods imply an effect of one of these vast laws.
--imply a distinct step in human progress; something
previously unrealized is being lived out, and rooted into
the heart of mankind. Nature never half does her
work. She goes over it, and over it, to make assurance
sure, and makes good her ground with wearying
repetition. A single section of a short paper is but a
small space to enter on so vast an enterprise, nevertheless,
a few very general words shall be ventured as a
suggestion of what this monastic or saintly spirit may
possibly have meant.

First, as the spirit of Christianity is antagonistic to
the world whatever form the spirit of the world assumes,
the ideals of Christianity will of course be their opposite;
as one verges into one extreme the other will
verge into the contrary. In those rough times the law
was the sword; animal might of arm, and the strong
animal heart which guided it, were the excellences
which the world rewarded, and monasticism, therefore,
in its position of protest, would be the destruction and
abnegation of the animal. The war hero in the
battle or the tourney yard might be taken as the apotheosis
of the fleshly man, the saint in the desert of the
spiritual. But this is slight, imperfect, and if true at all
only partially so. The animal and the spiritual are not
contradictories; they are the complements in the perfect
character; and in the middle ages, as in all ages of
genuine earnestness, interfused and penetrated each
other. There were warrior saints and saintly warriors;
and those grand old figures which sleep cross-legged in
the cathedral aisles were something higher than only
one more form of the beast of prey. Monasticism
represented something more positive than a protest against
the world. We believe it to have been the realization
of the infinite loveliness and beauty of