Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/66

56 in most cases only too well rid of this tearful and miserable world, and of an enslaved and unnatural if not altogether wasted life.

Whatever were the vices of those great armies of celibates who fought the battle of the Church during the Middle Ages, whatever their ambition, voluptuousness, gluttony, and avarice, their greatest enemy must own that we owe them much for the learning they hoarded, the education they encouraged, the charity they displayed, and the buildings they reared. Who can stand up and say that the builders of such churches as York Minster and Salisbury Cathedral were mere half-transmuted pagans? Was there no worship of the soul in the men who reared that pile and raised those towers—who hollowed those cloisters and carved those altars?

It is not for us to point out the faults of those men. Who are we, to judge of their vices or their sins? It is a sufficient proof that the monastic system was a necessary phase of Christianity that the monastic system existed. It was not the finger of a poor monk that could stop the rolling world. These convents were the fortresses of piety; their system was the reaction of sword-law, violence, and rapine. St. Bernard and King John, Rochester and Penn, St. Paul and Tiberius, Wesley and Wilkes, such are the typified reactions of every age. The very pastimes of these men were useful to ourselves. From the madness of alchemy sprang modern chemistry; from the dreams of astrology the certainties of astronomy. Faraday and Chaucer's "Cheat with the Alembec," Galeotti and Newton, had still something in common. To the monks' scholastic theology we owe the preservation of Aristotle; and the labours of their copiers saved Homer and Plato from the fate of Ennius and Sappho. Their ideal was too perfect for our nature yet. They were the first missionaries and the first colonizers—the defenders of the serf, the educators of the poor. The monk and the knight were necessary phases of a civilization dangerous and ridiculous only when their use was past. Every nation has given its art some peculiar attribute of divinity. That of the Mexican was terror, that of the Greek beauty, of the Egyptian repose, of the Assyrian power, of the monks love. Their faults were of their age. We should no more complain of St. Bernard preaching the crusade than we should of Elizabeth filling her prisons with the Jesuits, of Cromwell burning the priest, or Calvin drowning the Anabaptist.

For the majority of honest monks the convent was no doubt the whole world, and the cathedral a threshold of heaven. On that high altar, fifty years before, they had made their vow, by that altar they knelt on the eve of death; those huge windows, like the blazoned doors of paradise, had cast on their choir-books half a century of light and shadow. By this shrine they knelt the day when Brother Jerome died. In that cloister they used to pace together, and the greenest spot in the garth is where he lies, waiting for his old comrades in good works. Those great bells in the tower for them had the voices of friends.

Let us be satisfied by owning, then, that the monks were, after all, good and bad like other men, and that they led a more varied and useful life than has been generally imagined. It could not have been a wholly dissolute and selfish class from which such men as Chaucer's good parson sprang. When we read of the dregs of the convent, let us not forget those beautiful lines which paint a man who might have been a friend of Goldsmith's honest vicar.

W. T.