Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/741

Rh MONACHISM 713 first was the Oratory, founded by Philip Neri in 1558, but not approved by authority till 1577, and copied inde pendently by Cardinal de Berulle at Paris in 1611. There were no vows imposed on the members of this society, though they lived under rule, and they employed them selves in doing all kinds of clerical work under episcopal supervision. The Italian house is chiefly celebrated as having included the famous Cardinal Baronius amongst its earliest recruits ; but the French one held a high place in the religious revival of the 17th century, well-nigh rivalling the Benedictines of St Maur in learning (with such representatives as Simon, Thomassin, Morin, and Malebranche), and the reformed Cistercians of Port-Royal in piety, though sharing with the latter the reproach of Jansenism. But the second was far more influential, and has been fruitful ever since in the works of its copyists as well as in its own. It was the institute of the Sisters of Charity, established by Vincent de Paul in 1634, on the lines of the ancient community of the Hospitaller Nuns of St Augustine, but with some remarkable modi fications, not only in respect of the vows, which were only yearly and inward, but in the spirit of their discipline, as formulated in his own memorable words, &quot; Your convent must be the houses of the sick ; your cell, the chamber of suffering ; your chapel, the parish church ; your cloister, the streets of the city, or the wards of the hospital your rule, the general vow of obedience ; your grille, the fear of God ; your veil to shut out the world, holy modesty.&quot; The original scheme of Francis de Sales for the Nuns of the Visitation, founded in 1610, was almost identical ; but the opposition was then far too strong, and he was forced to make them a cloistered community. Vincent s order of Mission Priests, more commonly known as Lazar- ists, was also a successful and useful institute, though not vying in the extent of its influence with the other, which, as has been implied, has powerfully affected the organization of many of the active communities which have since been formed. No religious body did more to enable French monachism to bear up against the general obloquy it encountered during the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries, a temper on the part of the public due to more than one cause. In the first place, the wars of religion had done much to harden and coarsen the feelings on both sides, and rigid adherence to the extreme positions of Catholics or Huguenots, as the case might be, was set far above any gentler and higher ideas. Next, the monas teries of both sexes had all but universally fallen into the patronage of the crown (in virtue of the concordat of Bologna, between Pope Leo X. and Francis I.), and were jobbed away as apanages for a dissolute nobility, who squandered the revenues, and suffered discipline to become relaxed, often to the generation of serious scandals. This malversation operated in two ways. It made the monas teries hard and bad landlords, grasping closely all the feudal privileges and monopolies which they continued to enjoy, a proceeding which bore hard on the tenants and labourers, so that the monks shared to the full the unpopu larity of the nobles (precisely as was the case in Germany, during the Peasants War of 1525) ; and the evil repute of the rule and organization of the famous company, and taking the three usual vows, but, with a bold disregard of precedent, not only omitting the customary vow of inclosure, but actually sending the members of the society out as itinerant preachers. Their object was to train a body of emissaries for the Roman Catholic mission in England, who might obtain entrance and escape the incidence of the penal laws in a manner impracticable for men. They had considerable success for a time, and Mrs Ward, their projector, obtained some degree of papal approval, and became &quot; mother- general &quot; over more than 200 of these female preachers in the various colleges of the society. But after an existence of about eighty years it was suppressed by Pope Urban VIII. in 1630. the convents of whose real character we get at least one trustworthy glimpse in the account of the abbey of Mau- buisson which Angelique Arnauld reformed came home to all the Huguenots and their friends, because both before and after the legal continuance of the edict of Nantes they were used (according to a very early application of monastic houses not yet obsolete) as prisons, where Huguenot women and girls were shut up in order to bring about their conver sion, forcibly if necessary, but somehow in any case. And there is evidence to show that the Huguenots resented this policy most bitterly, not only on polemical grounds, but be cause they were firmly persuaded that the morals of their wives, daughters, and sisters were in no less peril than their faith in such places. When to this sentiment is added the hostility of the Jansenists to the school of opinion which had persecuted them, razed their famous house of Port- Royal, and literally flung the bones of its deceased members to the dogs, it will be easy to judge how powerful were the forces mustering for the overthrow of monachism, and how little even such stern reforms as De Ranee s at La Trappe, which has always had a marked attraction for soldiers, could do towards abating the danger. Nor were there wanting public scandals and cases before the law- courts which helped to fan the rising flames of hatred. 1 Another cause which contributed much to the decay of discipline and of practical religion in monasteries of both sexes was the custom which prevailed throughout the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, of disposing of the younger members of poor but noble families in the cloister as a safe and reputable provision, without any regard to the vocation of those so dedicated, and merely because the sum which sufficed to secure permanent admission was much smaller than that necessary to purchase a commis sion or public office for a son, or to provide an adequate dowry for a daughter. 2 At the Revolution, the religious Suppres- houses, amounting (without reckoning various minor colleges s i n f and dependent establishments) to 820 abbeys of men and ^&quot;^j 255 of women, with aggregate revenues of 95,000,000 livres, nionas. were suppressed by the laws of 13th February 1790 andteries. 18th August 1792. In Germany the storm had broken somewhat earlier, if not quite so violently. The Thirty Years War had wrought much mischief to not a few of the religious houses, without taking into account the great number which had been destroyed in the territories of the Protestant princes ; and when the death of Maria Theresa in 1780 left her son Joseph II. free to act as he pleased, he dissolved the Mendicant orders, and suppressed, in despite of the personal remonstrances of Pius VI., the greater number of monasteries and convents in his dominions. In Italy, despite the multiplication of new institutes, the process of decay continued throughout the 17th century, and one most remarkable testimony to the fact appears in the report of the Venetian ambassadors at Rome in 1650 to their government of an interview they had with Pope Alexander VII. 1 One of these is interesting, as settling a point which lias been often disputed, the existence of those monastic dungeons known by the name of &quot; in-pace,&quot; familiar to the readers of Marmion. It is the condemnation of the abbot of Clairvaux by the parlement of Paris in 1763 to a fine of 40,000 crowns for causing the deatli of a prisoner in an &quot;in-pace.&quot; 2 This worked much evil in France, but produced perhaps even greater mischief in Germany, where what were styled &quot;Noble Abbeys&quot; were not uncommon, entrance to which, save in the inferior capacity of lay-members, was barred against all who could not prove patrician descent and a certain number of armorial quarterings. A relic of this survives in a few secular Stiftungen (Protestant and Catholic) for noble canonesses in Germany; and the notion was at any rate as respectable as that which holds good in some communities even now, where women who can pay a certain sum at entrance are admitted as choir-sisters, while those who cannot do so must accept the humbler position of lay- sisters. XVI. 9