Page:Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (tr. Jane).djvu/18

xiv heroes are dedicating themselves, like the holy Abbot Easterwine, to a life not only of prayer and contemplation, but of hearty labour in the fields. Abuses enough—sufficiently painful, naively natural—existed in the monasteries, as we may learn from Bede's candid letter to Bishop Egbert; yet in the main no one can doubt the surprising beauty of life in these centres of labour, learning and love. A few centuries later it is possible to claim that monasticism suppresses and belittles human nature; in the time of Bede no critic can deny that its effect was to release and enrich. These Houses of Faith were centres of healthful democracy. "The monks," it has been said, "cultivated and extended with enthusiasm all the knowledge and literature possessed by the world in their day. The distant places toward which they had first been led by a love of solitude, changed rapidly and, as if by force of circumstances, into cathedrals, cities, towns or rural colonies, and served as centres, schools, libraries, workshops and citadels of the scarcely converted families, parties and tribes." In the midst of sterile turmoil. Order and Kindness, those two forces signalled by Ruskin as central impulses in a just society, ruled in the monastery and there alone.

As we watch this England, in which Christianity is at once so vital and so pure, the inner strength of the new life grows clear. First to strike us is the curious tone of joy, refreshing and awakening as a spring wind, that pervades the book. This joy has two sources. It arises from the release, purification and expansion of the natural affections, and it finds ultimate origin in the opening to mortal vision of those Heavens whence Eternal Love for ever watches and guides. To pass from Dear's Complaint, The Seafarer, or the fragmentary poems of The Edda, to Bede's stories of the early saints, is to escape from Natural Maligna to Natural Benigna. We flee from a world of sad grey seas and menacing landscape where an arrogant yet affrighted race moves tragically, boasting of its prowess, to a kindly fostering earth. The very prose of this new order is more lyrical than heathen verse; it is illumined by a