powerful influence on religion itself.
That it served to strengthen and perpetuate the life of religion there
can be little doubt. However strongly some people may have resented the
monastic ideal, it nevertheless gave increased strength and vitality to
the religious idea. To begin with, it offered for centuries a very
powerful obstacle to the development of those progressive and scientific
ideas that have made such advances in all centres of civilisation during
the past two or three centuries. To the common mind it brought home the
supremacy of religion in a way that nothing else could. The mere sight
of monarch and noble yielding homage to the monk, acknowledging his
supremacy in what was declared to be the chief interest in life, the
interference of the monk in every department of life, saturated society
with supernaturalism. And although at a later period the rapacity,
dissoluteness, and tyranny of the monkish orders led to revolt, by that
time the imagination of all had been thoroughly impressed with the value
of religion. Even to-day current theology is permeated with the monkish
notions of self-denial, self-sacrifice, and contempt of the world's
comfort and beauty as belonging to the essence of pure religion. The
lives of the saints still remain the storehouse of ideals for the
religious preacher. In spite of their absurd practices and disgusting
penances, later generations have not failed to hold them up as examples.
They have been used to impress the imagination of their successors, as
they were used to impress the minds of their contemporaries. The fact of
Thomas a Beckett wearing a hair shirt running with vermin has not
prevented his being held up as an example of the power of religion.
People fear ghosts long after they cease to believe in them; they pay
unreasoning homage to a crown long after intellectual development has
robbed the kingly office of its primitive significance; all the recent
developments of democracy have not abolished the Englishman's
constitutional crick in the neck at the sight of a nobleman. Nor is
supernaturalism expunged from a society because the conditions that gave
it birth have passed away. A religious epidemic is not analogous to
those physical disorders which deposit an antitoxin and so protect
against future attacks. It resembles rather those disorders that
permanently weaken, and so invite repeated assaults. The ascetic
epidemic passed away; but, before doing so, it thoroughly s