Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/58



trade and profession imaginable. The romantic idea of a conscientious friar— one whose physical system was worn down by fasts, whose knees were like Daniel's—callous from prayer—is hardly the monk in fact, who had callous hands, a good appetite, and a practical eye for worldly business. We have a shallow impression that the vast estates given the church in those ages were but illconceived liberality based on superstition; but when we consider the social purpose they served, and the interests they aggregated, and what protection they offered to those who would otherwise have been at the mercy of every wind of misfortune, we begin to imagine the early pious donors and testators by no means so irrational.

The monastery began at last to be a refuge for all classes of persons, whose wants and aspirations in life were not satisfied by the few callings left the masses by the troubles of the times. If a man wished a life of letters, he became a monk; if he desired a home by reason of some accident of constitution or feelings, he sought 2 monastery; the hood and gown became profession and position to all human waifs, and covered charitably all lackings in the matters of birth and position; nor was his usefulness by any means limited to the barren callings of prayer and praise. Palimpsest vandalism was not a general failing: there might be found many cloistered scholars, whose Latinity was Ciceronian enough, and monkish labors were of no insignificant character. There was scope for the most laudable ambitions; and the Abbot Samsons of those days acted their parts quite as heroically as any secular enthusiasts do to-day.

Before the Revolution in France, convent-life for women was a solace and resort to which they applied themselves in quite a matter-of-fact sort of way. There grew up to supply the wants of the times, sisterhoods of all degrees of laxity and restraint. It is true

there were the most frightful abuses in every corner of ecclesiastical life; but it is much to be questioned whether the vices attendant upon convents were any more monstrous than might be noted in every department of French society during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or were particularly attributable to the nature of the establishments. A social generation, that accepted Pompadours, du Barris, and Parcs aux Cerfs, might well suffer a little licentious extravagance in its devotes. It can hardly be charged upon monastic doctrines, that in an administrative light they proved failures. They were but too successful; and it needed the severest exercise of arbitary power to break them up. Corporations, however soulless, have exhibited an extraordinary vitality. England swarms with eleemosynary establishments that have retained in petrifaction the most minute eccentricities of their foundation, to the disgust of all who have agrarian desires. Such abstract too much from the tide of public prosperity to be gratifying to the greed and selfishness of the public. There is an uncontrollable desire always to cut canals from these banked-up reservoirs to the common stream. In this land, the simple followers of Father Junipero were by no means offensive on account of their vices; they had done a good work in the civilization of California, as any one who has observed the docile character for usefulness of our civilized Indian in contrast with the almost idiotic stupidity of his wild brother, can testify: they were by no means lazy or luxurious; but they could not help making their work show itself in the acquirement and enhancement of the value of their lands, and they were stripped of their possessions with a grasping violence that would have done credit to the needy creatures of bluff Harry.

But there are directions that monastic organization might take to-day without